


Spectra

by windandthestars



Category: Spectral (2016), The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Feels, F/M, Near Future, Spectral verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 16:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12136797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windandthestars/pseuds/windandthestars
Summary: He sighs but she can tell he isn’t angry anymore, resigned and a little frustrated perhaps, he had never known her to listen when he wanted her to. “If you’re going to do this-”“That's sweet, Will.” She flashes him a smile knowing he hadn’t intended to make the gallant overture she’s implying, even if he wasn’t going to let her do this on her own.“You'd better be standing in front of me when they come for us.”“I'm quite a good with a handgun; I'm an excellent shot. My hand to hand is a little-”“All right, but if this blows up,” he cuts her off with a look, “don't hang around.”“I'd prefer not to take my foot off the landmine in the first place.” She tells him seriously. “We'd both be better off that way.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for mentions of war, violence, character death (off screen from the film), and mild language.
> 
> Spectral verse AU because I watched the film and thought jokingly ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if instead of Afghanistan this was Mac’s war?’ I should know better than to make jokes like that, but 25k later I’m not sure I’ve learned my lesson.
> 
> I've tried to be as true to the film as possible but I've only seen it once, so anything I can't remember or anything that wasn't mentioned I've made up. Spoilers for most of the plot of the film, although I have tried to be as vague (and specific) as possible without rehashing or spoiling the entire thing. Only minor mentions of the show, mainly from the first season.
> 
> Title partly from the film and partly because I thought the definition fitting: “Spectra: plural form of spectrum. Spectrum: noun. used to classify something, or suggest that it can be classified, in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme or opposite points.”

_And the only solution was to stand and fight And my body was bruised and I was set alight / But you came over me like some holy rite And although I was burning, you're the only light_  
“Only if for a Night” Florence + the Machine 

Her name never makes it into any of the broadcasts. She hadn’t expected it to. She hadn’t mentioned her role in what had transpired in Moldova in any of the reports she had written up and she had written plenty. Mark Clyde had saved the day. That’s what she had said. The shining star of the US Defense Department had saved them all from destruction, ended the war. The conclusions of her reports varied depending on who they were intended for, but she was missing from all of them and she preferred it that way, the same way she would prefer people to stop asking her why she wasn’t following Clyde home to where ever he had come from, she hadn’t bothered to ask where exactly that was. She hadn't cared.. They had worked well out of necessity not chemistry, why a bunch of special op guys and their medics couldn't tell the difference was beyond her. She wasn't interested in Clyde. She wasn't interested in attachments.

She had spent the last several years beating that into herself, somewhat literally if her mild concussion was any indication, but even so, the children had shaken her up. The girl still slept on the cot beside hers. She hadn’t expected to find a pair of children in the middle of a war zone, hadn’t expected that they would save each other's lives. She may have been covering war, death, drought, and famine for years but she still had a heart that ached in her chest when she wished it wouldn’t.

She would have to leave the girl, move on to her next assignment. The girl was safer here anyway, now that the war had ended. There would be someone somewhere who could take her in. Mac had promised her she would find someone who had known her father, someone who would look after her. It was proving to be a struggle. Most of the radio relays in this part of the country were gone, most of the people left had fled to the south. Mac only had another week before they wanted her back in DC so she could help them redraw the map, carve out and highlight the countries turned hotbeds, turned wastelands.

She traveled light, wrote mostly for audio broadcast, preferring, if it didn’t go straight to radio, to see her work read out from behind a desk, an old fashioned affinity, and not as some sort of VR abomination. It was the primary reason she refused to travel with a cameraman or any sort of recording gear. The network always made a fuss, but she had the best access, could move faster, could go to more remote places than anyone else they employed so they generally let her have her way, called her eccentric and paid no attention to the fact she rarely if ever requested a translator, a local guide. In areas of active combat, the military was generally accommodating enough when they realized she could translate just as quickly, just as accurately as any of their guys and she’d had basic training, could carry a gun, and pack her own combat gear, wiggle into a suit on her own, in other places she made her own way, befriending a carefully chosen web of locals.

The network fussed over that occasionally. She never used their fixers when they had one, but she hadn’t spent six years in school, picking up language after language in her spare time to pretend she couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. It was an inclination that had served her well this time around.

She hadn’t spoken any Romanian when she had arrived four months ago, but she’d had a solid understanding of Spanish and French and a passable understanding of Italian. They had been reluctant to let her off base at first so she had spent most of her time in the radio room with the operators, listening to the chatter they picked up from the locals, scoured the databases she had access to for any remnants of the written language. Once she had convinced them she knew enough to be useful they sent her out to secure areas to deliver aid, meet with their allies in the local government. She was supposed to be a ride-along, an extra pair of hands at best, but it wasn’t long before that pretense had been abandoned.

She hadn’t intended to be the last remaining translator, but she hadn’t been entirely surprised. It had happened before, albeit with much less at stake. It had all, narrowly, ended well this time and so she tries not think of the way her heart and sputtered and died in her chest the moment before Clyde had pulled the plug. She had the girl to think about now and a beer, if warm and somewhat stale, to drink, another week before she had to be back in DC

*

Her flight lands as the sun is setting, the twenty four hour journey finally ended. The delay in London that had necessitated several exasperated phone calls to her boss, to the head of the network, was behind her. She still had three flights of stairs to climb before she could crawl into bed, a real bed for the first time in a year, but she didn’t mind. The rent was cheap, abysmally so even considering the antiquated AK-47 Mattie cradled in his lap as he waved to her from the stoop at the corner.

“I’m not staying long, una semana.” She grins at him as she waves back. “You and Jazelle,” she waves a hand through the air. She let him, most of the kids in the neighborhood, use her place when she was out of town. It meant her stuff stayed where she had left it, someone watered her plants, and the kids had someplace of their own, two rooms without the prying eyes of half a dozen relatives. She knew what most of them chose to do, they would change the sheets if they knew she was coming back, but on nights like tonight when she had surprised them, she would smell it in the sheets.

She knocks before she enters. She had heard Mattie give the signal to clear out, a low owlish hoot, but she still waits before shoving the door open and dropping her bag into the sliver of space that constituted her living room, the wedge between the sofa and the kitchen.

The bedroom wasn’t much bigger, space for a bed, a fold down table, the wall of cabinets that served as a closet, a door to the bathroom, shower overhead, toilet and sink combo tucked into the corner. She turns on the tap, letting the hot water make its way up from the boiler while she peels off the clothes she’s been wearing for two days.

There will be messages she has to check, data points to submit, questionnaires from ad agencies she’ll ignore. She’ll ignore them all if she can. She’s hardly ever in town long enough to bother, doesn’t see the point of skewing anyone’s data with her off-color opinions. She covered the wars her government supported, she reported on the effects her country was having on the world, but she didn’t buy into its core message, its values and assertions. It was all a bunch of bullshit and she knew it.

She didn’t mind as much as she might have. She wasn’t in country enough for it to get to her. She didn’t deal directly with any of it while she was working. If the network wanted to twist her reports around to fit their agenda she wouldn’t bother to try and stop them, she was too busy collecting evidence to show how wrong they were, showing them over and over again that the world in front of her wasn’t the world that they presented to the American public. As long as she could head back overseas they wouldn’t hear a peep from her. She caused enough trouble for them as it was, she knew that, but that wasn’t anything compared to the damage she could do if they made the mistake of putting her on the air.

*

She’s out. Someone had gotten wind of what she had done and they want her doing interviews, they want to turn her into a celebrity, and she doesn’t want to hear a word of it. They’re still trying to convince her. They’ve given her two weeks vacation and a promise of a sizable raise, a company apartment, access to a co-op car. They haven’t threatened her directly, they were still trying to sweet talk their way in to convincing her, but she’s not stupid enough to think that her job isn’t on the line. They’ll give her the two weeks, try and woo her with the sparkly flashy lifestyle they all want and when that doesn’t work, they’ll ask for her press credentials. 

She doesn’t have to turn them over, but they can be voided out, blacked out. They won’t be able to revoke her military access. She had been careful to make sure she had government issued credentials along with the ones her network had supplied her, but she wouldn’t be able to publish anything domestically. She could look at international firms but her network had to know that would be a hard sell. She had worked exclusively for US networks from the start, her work, the public face of it, was tainted with support for the government’s endeavors, no foreign entity would want to touch her, not after her network dropped her without a proper release, without an explanation. Still she wasn’t willing to step into the role of celebrity, that wasn’t a line she wanted to cross. The network may have seen the perks, outlined them clearly, but they were failing to see the pitfalls, the landmine she’d be standing on, the temptation of the cameras, the things she had seen that would never make it on the air.

She normally saves her drinking for overseas, but with the black void of the neighborhoods, everyone knew better than to call slums, and the over-lit core of downtown her only two choices, she had chosen to spend much of her time off in a local bar frequented by ex-military types. Hollow shells of their former selves, husks of men, some with an ax to grind, most of them just wanting to be left alone, to live out the rest of their lives avoiding the truth of what they had seen. She could relate, left them in peace, bought a round of pool or a game of darts for the guys who wanted to talk.

They were men who could have had futures, the ones who could have made something of themselves if they’d had the support they needed. The ones that were worse off, the ones hooked on the drugs the military hadn’t bothered to wean them off, the ones who were dead and dying, you never saw them. They were kept hidden away by sympathetic family and friends. These men, they could be saved, but they were beyond her help so she sits and drinks with them, commiserates.

She’s talking to an ex-SEAL, better off than most of the men here, he was bitter, lost not by rank but because of his disillusionment. He’s all too happy to tell her about his exploits, rebel by slipping in details she shouldn’t be hearing. They’ve drawn a crowd, but she doesn’t try to put a stop to his retelling. He hasn’t been drinking, the only drug in his veins is anger and she knows better than to stem the tide even when one man jokingly calls out that he ought to be careful chatting up a reporter like that.

There’s no way any of the men could know. No one here know what she did. No one here knew who she was or so she had thought until the crowd thins out and she goes back to her beer, only to find the seat next to her once again occupied.

“MacKenzie.” The man nods, slides her another beer without glancing over, even as she lets out a quiet mew of surprise.

“And you are?” She isn’t on guard, not yet, but he does have her attention. She is being careful.

“Charlie Skinner.”

She has no idea who he is, what he wants, but he didn’t belong here that much was clear. He wasn’t Gunny Skinner, not even straight up Charlie. He had two names and a confidence she didn’t trust. “I’m not interested.” 

“I haven’t offered you anything.” He counters smoothly, calmly.

“Doesn’t matter.” She knocks back the rest of her beer, picks up the one he had bought her. “I’m afraid I was just leaving.”

“I can offer you an hour of prime time.” He says it like he isn’t sitting in the middle of a bar full of guys disillusioned with the government, with the media, with the Fourth Estate as a whole. No one trusted journalists any more and she didn’t blame them.

“You might want to watch how loudly you say that.” She says dryly, staying seated against her butter judgment. “You might want to watch who you say that to.”

He only shrugs, unbothered, and turns to watch her scrape a nail over the rim of her beer bottle.

“I’m employed.”

“Not for long.” He reminds her and she sighs, not so much out of acceptance but out of disdain, she had known word would get out. It was bound to leak. They would want to ratchet up the pressure somehow. This was one way to do it, put out feelers, cut her off from any future prospects, before she had a chance to put a toe out of line.

“That’s a dangerous proposition.”

“I have an anchor who’s willing to have his arm twisted.”

“I’d worry less about the puppet and more about your own skin.” She frowns at him, waits for him to back down, but he doesn’t give an inch. “No EP walks out of that alive.”

“Well it’s a good thing I’m the director of the division then.”

“Wait,” she slides back onto the stool she had started to vacate. “Who’s the EP?”

“You are.” He says like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like she had already lost her mind and agreed.

“No way.” It’s a reflex borne out of self-preservation: reflexive denial, plausible deniability.

“It’s safer than it coming out of your own mouth when you can’t toe the company line.”

She glares at him. She knew just as well as anyone how to keep her mouth shut, how to stay alive, but she knew the risk the camera posed, the pointed questions she was supposed to deflect, the quiet demure persona she was supposed to adopt.

“They’ll pull your funding.”

“We’re funded by a group of foreign investors.” Overseas dissonants. She knows organizations like that exist, wonders how he had gotten mixed up with them. 

“They’ll throw your anchor in jail, put a bullet in my head.”

“Not if word gets out about what you did.”

“That’s not happening.” She tells him emphatically, hoping she hadn’t missed a threat in his voice. “The could make it look like an accident. You can’t tell me that hasn’t happened before.”

“They may overreach, but they would stop short of outright murder, especially in connection to the country’s second most popular anchor. They need the public to trust the bullshit they’re spewing in the media, a scandal of that magnitude would undermine everything they’ve worked for.”

“I appreciate you being so cavalier with my life.”

“I knew you had a strong sense of self-preservation. I hadn’t expected you to be a coward.” He shrugs. He seems to think they’re bantering, teasing. She bristles.

“It’s a realistic threat assessment.”

“It’s a chance for you to do some fucking good, to shape the debate.”

“Would I prefer to do a broadcast that allowed for open debate, honesty? Is that even a question? Realistically-”

“You’re letting them scare you.”

“Maybe I am.” She say bluntly with a frown she’s careful not to let turn into a glare.

“Were you scared that afternoon, in Moldova when you-”

“Took a one way trip into the belly of the beast,” she supplies the metaphor for him, in case he had felt like disclosing details she didn’t need the whole world to know. “In all honesty, yes. We all were. It’s hard not to be when you’re human.”

“But you did it anyway.”

“I didn’t have much choice.”

“That’s bullshit.” He smiles at her unruffled. “Do it again. Come back with me to New York.”

*

New York is louder than DC had been, brighter, more crowded, the people swarming around her more affluent, better dressed. She was in Manhattan she had to remind herself, not in the neighborhoods that ringed the city proper. The highrises here were populated by government contractors, the media elite. Her new apartment was fully integrated, touch panels by each of the doors, the temperature, light, and ambient sound all regulated to provide her maximum comfort. The food she ate was delivered, on request, from the stock in the subterranean levels.

It made her squeamish to think of the army of workers whose survival depended on her comfort, her every whim. They were the rejects: unfit, too young, too old for military service. Charlie had insisted she take the accommodations provided by the network but it still made her uncomfortable knowing that while the military had automated decades ago, while most of what she saw above ground was fully automated, there was a human army behind it all still, the government and corporations too concerned with the bottom line to invest in the technology that could end so much suffering.

Breakfast arrives and she has to eat it scrolling through the newsfeeds, keeps herself distracted with ferreting out the truth from between the lies, so she doesn’t think too long and hard about where the food had come from. The food in the newsroom wouldn’t be any different, but she would have bigger concerns, much bigger concerns if she went through with this like she was planning.

She hadn’t bothered to ask who she was supposed to be working with, hadn’t asked which show or which topics she was supposed to be covering, She hadn’t bothered to ask why he wanted her, she figured she knew the answer to that one, figured he had more than enough leverage, enough reason to ignore the fact she had spent the better part of a decade reporting from the field, writing reports and producing the occasional segment, while she had spent, collectively, six months at most in a studio. She was familiar with the equipment, had used at least half of it in a military context, had learned to broadcast a signal from an underground bunker somewhere under Northern Africa. If Charlie Skinner wanted her, she figured he might as well have her before she packed her bags and fled to Europe. If she was going to spend the rest of her life with a price on her head it might as well be for good reason.

“You didn’t tell me.” She glares at him, shifts a hand up to her hip and frowns darkly at the unconcerned look on his face. 

“I didn’t tell Will either.” Charlie is as calm as ever, unruffled by her protest.

“I did not agree to- Will-” She looks up startled by his sudden appearance and they stare at each other, frozen, until she regains her footing, drops her hand to her side, tries to smile. “Charlie was just telling me what an ass he is.”

*

“You bought his bullshit.” Will is unimpressed.

“I don’t buy anyone’s shit. You know that.” She throws back at him angrier than she should be. “I don’t-”

“But you’re here to talk me into drinking the kool-aid. You always were a little reckless MacKenzie, but I would think that this was a bit much even for you.”

“He isn’t wrong exactly-”

“And neither am I.” Will cuts in smugly and she clenches her jaw to keep from snapping at him.

“He didn’t give me much choice, but he isn’t wrong. There's nothing that's more important in a democracy than a well-informed electorate.”

“You need to get the hell out of here before-.” 

“When there's no information or, much worse, wrong information, it can lead to calamitous decisions and clobber any attempts at vigorous debate. That's why I report the news.” She plows ahead not wanting to let him get a word in edgewise. She knows he would have seen the newsfeeds that morning, would have seen her name showing up, would have seen it showing up more and more frequently as the story had spread. And he couldn’t have missed Charlie’s well timed press release. They were both stuck here, she was stuck here, stuck with this whether or not she wanted to be. This job was the thin skin of ice between her and a plunge into a bottomless chasm.

“We're all grateful to you.”

“You're spinning out of control.”

“No, I'm not.”

“You're terrified you're going to lose governmental approval and end up stuck with the rest of us on the military assembly line. You're one pitch meeting away from doing the news in VR.”

“This isn't nonprofit theater. It's a network mandated broadcast. You know that, right?’

She pauses, takes a deep breath. She isn’t sure why it’s so important for her to sell him on this. They could do as much as Charlie asked and no more. They could do their jobs and pray Charlie took most of the heat. They could, but she finds that she doesn’t want to, that this is important to her, important to Will too. He hadn’t stopped to think about it, hadn’t let himself think about it in the same way she hadn’t, but he wants this too. She was almost sure of that. “This is exactly what we always talked about. This is what we dreamed of.”

“What is it you're talking to me about right now?”

“How many hours did you and I spend talking about how flawed the media is? We couldn’t do anything about it then, but now-”

“I would rather be employed, if it's all the same to you.”

“It's not all the same to me, you punk. I've come here to take your IQ and your talent and put it to some patriotic fucking use.“

“That’s impossible.”

“Between your brains, charm, looks, and affability and my expertise-”

“Refusal to live in reality.” He interrupts over top of her before grabbing a tablet from his desk to shove toward her.

“It's impossible, Mac. Forget everything else. Social scientists have concluded that the world is more polarized than at any time since the 2016 election. The 2016 election. Do you know when that will make it to air? Never. Never Mac, because we’d all be swinging from the trees before we’ve signed off for the night.”

“Yes, the government chooses the news they want now, but-”

“The government choose the facts they want now. So what you've just described is impossible.”

“Only if you think an overwhelming majority of Americans are preternaturally stupid.”

“I do.”

“I don't. And if you let me, I can prove it. They’re afraid, but they want the truth.”

“Mac-”

“No.” She cuts in sharply. “This isn’t over. America is the only country on the planet that, since its birth, has said over and over and over that we can do better. It's part of our DNA. People will want the news if you give it to them with integrity. Not everyone, but enough. Even now. So we can do better.”

“Mac.” He says more softly, less emphatically, looking at her like he had once looked at the stray dog they had stumbled upon cowering in a closet in an abandoned building. “I have to write my script.”

“I'll write it for you.” She throws back, refusing to back down. She isn’t angry at him for refusing, for being scared, for being confused by this dream turned reality. She’s angry because he’s looking at her like she’s beyond all hope, like the best he could do was to walk away and pretend he hadn’t seen her. He was better than that, she knew it. It made her furious, but she also knew how to bite her tongue, to use sarcasm instead of anger to prove her point. “The proxy war continues in Eastern Europe where Russian-backed troops have seen heavy casualties. American and Allied troops have seen a boost in morale after a visit from the US-”

"You want me shouting into the void until one of us ends up with a bullet in our head?”

“I want you to not apologize for telling the-”

“All right!”

“You got yourself into this when you started arguing with Charlie.”

“It was a debate, Mac. We were drunk.”

“You should have won it.” She glares back at him.

“And what does winning look like to you?”

“Reclaiming the Fourth Estate. Reclaiming journalism as an honorable profession. A nightly newscast that informs a debate worthy of a great nation. Civility, respect, and a return to what's important. We're coming to a tipping point. I know you know that. There's gonna be a huge conversation. Is government an instrument of good or is it every man for himself? Is there something bigger we want to reach for or is self-interest our basic resting pulse? You and I have a chance to be among the few people who can frame that debate.”

“That's not what- It's-”

“Quixotic?”

“Not the point.” He sighs but she can tell he isn’t angry anymore, resigned and a little frustrated perhaps, he had never known her to listen when he wanted her to. “If you’re going to do this-”

“That's sweet, Will.” She flashes him a smile knowing he hadn’t intended to make the gallant overture she’s implying, even if he wasn’t going to let her do this on her own.

“You'd better be standing in front of me when they come for us.”

“I'm quite a good with a handgun; I'm an excellent shot. My hand to hand is a little-”

“All right, but if this blows up,” he cuts her off with a look, “don't hang around.”

“I'd prefer not to take my foot off the landmine in the first place.” She tells him seriously. “We'd both be better off that way.”

*

They don’t push much for their first broadcast. She had wanted to make a point, make a statement. She wanted to know how badly this was going to end instead of waiting in suspense, but Will wouldn’t hear of it. They weren’t a threat. They didn’t need to be seen as one. If they started slow, if they let it creep up on people they could win them over, add a layer of popular support, protection, by the time the government tried to squash them like an ant underfoot.

She had grumbled at him all through the A-block, but quieted after they aired the segment on several South American regimes in the C-block. On the surface, it was the same segment that had appeared on the other networks, but the tone was different. Will had insisted they not make any overt statements, but he had allowed her to write the copy, allowed her to thread a note of optimism through the mentions of pro-democracy demonstrators in Venezuela. The protesters weren’t an issue, the US government supported all overseas democratic institutions, it was their message, democratic trappings did not a democracy make. It was a message, a discussion rarely heard domestically, one she knew no one would hear if someone wasn’t shouting it loudly from the rooftops.

By Friday she has Will agreeing to pepper the broadcast with critiques of the latest budget proposal. They toe the line in the segment that presents the actual proposal, straying only as far as they dare when mentioning the latest military expenditures, but there are other mentions, the social safety nets abolished decades ago, living standards for foreign aid provisions that would, if applied domestically, improve the lives of millions, the lack of funding for civilian led scientific research.

Will snaps at her once during the broadcast, a sharp edged dagger, that makes her wonder if maybe she’s pushing too hard, wonder if his lack of protest wasn’t a sign of consent but a reflexive reaction to being shoved head first into a perilously murky situation.

He signs off, waits until the projection equipment spins down and then heads for his office, ignoring her as she trails along behind him hoping they can talk about this before he goes home and stews for the entire weekend. If he’s going to tell her off she would rather it be now. If he was going to yell at her, tear into her, she would rather have the weekend to lick her wounds.

“Have I-?” She starts as soon as the glass wall has frosted over, but he cuts her off with the look of fury she had been hoping she wouldn’t see.

“We stood in my office that first morning and I said under no circumstances did I want anyone here to know what happened. And you said yes, and yes again. And it really- it really seemed like you understood. And then you went and gave an interview-”

“I forgot.” She cuts in loudly, more emphatically than she should. “I- Will- the interviews were prerecorded. Charlie- I thought. It had been over a week. I wasn’t thinking about-”

“When I said-”

“I know,” she winces, “I’m sorry. I should have told you but I was so- I’m sorry, I-”

She cuts herself off. She knows she should square her shoulders, stop pleading, and take whatever tongue lashing he has in store, but she hated this as much as he did. She was here because she had refused to talk about what had happened in Moldova, refused the interviews Charlie had so cleverly talked her into. She was a human being. She had saved humanity. She hadn’t mentioned any specifics. She hadn’t needed to. No mentions of the government or her ‘patriotic duty’ had been made. She hadn’t needed to say anything that made her uncomfortable, hadn’t needed to say much at all, but that afternoon had still left her with a bitter taste in her mouth and a knot in her stomach.

“I was trying to forget.” She sighs frustrated by the possibility she might have to explain. She had seen a lot over the years, had known from the beginning that the only way to save herself from it all was to forget.

Will had served briefly, but had never left American shores; he had been too clever, too smart to sacrifice. While he would understand the underpinnings of her argument, he had no way of understanding what it felt like to have your nightmares spattered across every screen in the country.

She had done the interviews knowing Charlie would leak the story, knowing he would use public opinion to leverage her life, keep her as safe as he could. She hated that this was the way it had to be, but she had known what she was agreeing to the day she had walked out of the bar and booked a rail ticket to New York.

“No.” Will throws back at her and for a second she can only stare at him, trying to figure out if he didn’t believe her or, if he knew it was more complicated than she was letting on.

“Will.” She doesn’t know what else to say. She doesn’t know what he wants to hear. There’s a part of her that wants to offer to go, although they both know she can’t. She wants to go even though the thought terrifies her, even though the thought of him saying yes breaks her heart. They’ve argued before, she’s overstepped, pushed him away- he still hasn’t forgiven her for last time she knows- she’s spent years running only to come back again, but she knows this time could be different. He was always trying to protect her, even when he was furious with her, but there would come a day when he couldn’t, when he wouldn’t and she could only pray that that day wasn’t today.

“Stupid,” he says and it’s not as angry as she thinks it should be, because she knows he’s still angry, still furious, but he’s restraining himself, trying as much as possible to pick his words carefully. 

“Why the fuck?” He sighs exasperatedly, turning away for a second to scrub a hand over his face. “Why would you?”

“I needed, need the cover.” She says quietly trying to hide the sudden quiver in her voice. She’s trembling now, and she thinks maybe she has been, thinks maybe it’s what had calmed him down. 

“There’s absolutely nothing of substance in the interviews. You didn’t say,” He narrows his eyes at her, considering. “You didn’t say anything that wasn’t in the press release. You could have been talking about anyone, anywhere.”

She looks at him knowing she looks confused. 

“Did you, please tell me Charlie-”

“He made some suggestions, but I- I said what I wanted.”

“You didn’t say anything. You could have gone to London or-”

“No.” She shakes her head, sure about this. “I couldn’t have, not after Charlie pointed out- I want to do this Will. I wanted to and if I had to, if the interviews were the price I had to pay, if I, we, that’s ok too.” It wasn’t ok, the thought of losing him, but if she could stay, if he would let her stay, there was still a chance and she could learn to live with that.

“What happened Mac?” He asks her gently, tempting her with his sudden calm. “What happened in Moldova?”

“Will, no.” She says and she means it. He shouldn’t be asking, not because he couldn’t, but because the old Will would have known better, wouldn’t have asked her for something she couldn’t give, not something like this. “I almost died once. That’s enough.”

Once, she can see he wants to say. It’s been more than once, so many more times, but she’s never counted, has made a point of not counting. She’s made a point of not letting it get to her, of not letting it scare her and she knows he knows that. She hadn’t said a word, but he knows that something more had happened in Moldova, something dangerous. It’s more than he should know, more than was safe because she realizes now what Charlie’s leverage is, what it had been all along. The dangers of war were more than the war itself, even when war begot war; the spoils of war could be dangerous too. She doesn’t know how he knows, who had told him, but Charlie knew and now she was the bargaining chip. If anything happened to her or to Will, the whole country would know. Everyone would know the government was willing to court danger, if not certain death, to win wars no one remembered how they had started.

*

He hasn’t said a word to her about Moldova after that first week. He hasn’t said a word to her about Moldova or the broadcasts they’re doing even though they’ve long past the border between acceptable dissonance and treason. In fact he seems to be enjoying himself, pushing her occasionally to allow him to use more open language.

She loves what they’re doing, but there are moments when she considers backing off. Will is the only one to give voice to these thoughts but they’re there, frustrating her with their persistence.

The stories aren’t helping. There isn’t anything from the major networks. They’re relegated to the back channels, the news media produced by the few pockets of dissonance their broadcasts have stirred up, but they’re there, plainly scrolling by in front of her as she drinks her morning coffee.

Will, she knows, wouldn’t have seen them, anything outside of the mainstream media is outside his purview, but there have been a couple. There aren’t any details. There isn’t much other than her name and a connection to the Special Ops teams in Moldova, but it’s enough to keep it in her mind, enough to remind her of the threat.

The summer slides by and then the fall. They cover the elections, carefully sewing seeds of doubt while staying away from any truly treasonous statements. Will wants to make a big fuss before the holidays because it’s been long enough, just long enough that he might not get himself or someone else thrown in jail, but she won’t hear about it. Won’t let him get a word in edgewise until he agrees that she’s rubbed off on him, that he’s sounding like her, that maybe she had been right about this from the beginning.

February becomes March and she can’t imagine how he hasn’t noticed the stories, noticed the way they can’t seem to keep her name out of the press. She isn’t stoking the fire. She hasn’t given any more interviews, hasn’t said a word, has made sure her name never comes up in relation to a News Night broadcast, but Charlie had done his work, done it too well.

“What is this?” He drops a readout onto her desk, the flexible screen clattering as it shivers with the force of its fall.

“What is-” She looks up from the article she had been skimming, a wire report from Eastern Europe, and frowns at him. Will never came into the office on the weekends, hated that she did, but she felt safer here working, knowing her material never left the secured perimeter of the AWM building. Her apartment was secure he would tell her, and it was, but there was too much dead air between the two, too many wires and connections, too many possible exploitations.

“Beginning in August, journalist MacKenzie-” He picks a quote from somewhere partway through the article as she’s scrambling to catch up. She hadn’t checked the weekend news reports. She hardly ever checked them before Sunday evening. She should have checked the weekend news reports.

“It was bound to happen.” She tries to sound indifferent, tries to sound like this is the first time she’s seen anything like this, like this is the first time an article like this has been picked up by a venue that could almost be described as respectable.

“This is going to get you killed, Mac.”

She blinks at him, startled by his outburst. He’s irritated by how unruffled she seems, but he isn’t angry. He’s scared.

“No, Will,” she scrambles for the words she needs to show him that she’s being honest, not cavalier. “There’s nothing there. Someone’s trying to make a splash. They watch the show. They’re hoping-”

“Is this Charlie?” He demands. 

“God, Will, no.” She shakes her head, reaches hesitantly for the hand he’s still running over lines of text. “This was a mistake. We can back off of our coverage a little bit. This will go away. You don’t have to worry.”

She can see that he knows she’s trying to placate him, but he takes her at her word, lets her soothe him, because there isn’t anything else they can do, because trying to scare her, trying to make her see sense has never worked for him in the past.

“We’ll go back to boring for a couple of days.” She promises with a smile. “We’ll talk about war zones I’ve never been to and the cops who stopped a robbery with a slingshot, because this is Manhattan, a city so secure even the cops can’t get guns in.”

“This isn’t funny, Mac.” He says, but he had smiled a little when she had mentioned the cops. He had evidently seen the photos that had accompanied the press, the young rookie cop grinning, holding up a slingshot that looked like it was made out of toothpicks and rubber bands.”

“Did you see the puppy?” She asks. “The one the cop had, with the big floppy ears.” She holds her hands up next to her head in imitation and manages to earn herself a chuckle. “He was so adorable.”

*

She doesn’t know how he found it before she did, but he had and she really wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need to see this. She could have watched it and he wouldn’t have had to see it. She would have had to tell him about it of course, but at least he wouldn’t have had to see it, not that he’s watching it now. He’s watching her, to make sure she’s watching. She knows that’s what it is. He hadn’t seen it all the way through, there’s no way he could have, they haven’t been off the air long enough for that, but he’s intent on making sure she sees it even though hearing it would be enough, more than enough.

She doesn’t scare easily enough for him, doesn’t take the threat seriously enough and she knows he’s waiting to see the moment when it hits her, if it hits her. 

She’s not sure what she’s supposed to do when it does, because she knows. She’s known from the beginning. She hadn’t known how to tell him, to tell him what’s really on the line, because it’s a lot more than the two of them, and she can’t tell him that.

The commentary ends and the anchor appears back on the screen. It’s a broadcast from one of the state sponsored media companies, the number one show in the country. It garnered a big enough audience at eight that they reaired it at eleven unedited. She could watch this whole thing later from the comfort of her bed, pay more attention to what’s being said because right now she’s more focused on not turning around. She wants to get a glimpse of Will’s face, see how he’s taking this, but more than that she wants to know what Charlie thinks because he hasn’t said a word since he had walked in and that wasn’t like him.

“Treasonous.” Will echos the broadcast and she has to force herself not to sigh. There isn’t anything unpredictable here. It’s exactly what she had expected to see even if she hadn’t expected to see it now.

Things had gone on long enough, the irritation had grown into a threat. This was their only warning. You don’t mention an annoyance, something you hope will go away, but you do openly condemn someone you see as a threat. They wouldn’t mention the broadcast, the broadcasts, not a word from their show would be uttered on state sponsored media, but the implication was clear and that was more than enough.

“Why aren’t we dead?” She asks because she knows no matter what she says it won’t be the reaction Will is hoping for. She asks because it’s the last question she needs to ask. She already knows. “Charlie?”

“Mac.” Will cuts in and she can tell that he’s angry, rapidly becoming furious, but she’s still watching the screen, not looking at him, the video flickering as the edge of his shirt brushes against the side of the projection field.

“Charlie.”

“I had a meeting I never told you guys about. Last week Leona called me.”

She turns, ignoring Will, refusing to look at him. She needs to hear this, needs to hear every last word because already she knows she’s only going to get half of the truth and she needs the whole thing.

“They heard rumblings through a back channel. The government isn’t happy. They asked me to have you back off.”

Told me, Mac fills in mentally and then strikes the whole statement out. Leona, whoever she was, would never had said anything close to what Charlie is suggesting. She would have threatened to cut their funding, put an end to the broadcast altogether, not offer a weak suggestion if such a thing had even occurred to her. And the threat hadn’t come last week, although she doesn’t doubt Charlie’d had a meeting last week. The threat had come weeks ago, months ago, around the election if she had to guess. They had backed off then out of expediency, an unintentional misdirect, the only reason the segment they’re all watching hadn’t aired earlier.

“Leona-” she starts to query but Charlie cuts in, “Reese, actually,”

“Lansing.” She hears the name slip out of her mouth, feels Will take a step closer to her and knows she must have gone pale or turned green because there’s no way he’s let her off the hook already. “Reese Lansing.”

Charlie nods and she presses a hand to her mouth, forces herself to take a deep breath. “Reese Lansing is financing this network?”

“You say that like-” Charlie starts but she stops listening because it doesn’t matter. He would have thought this through, but he wouldn’t have thought it all the way through. He wouldn’t have considered her exit plan. He would have assumed she wouldn’t need it. She might have needed it. She certainly had counted on it, and it had just gone up in smoke.

She was under the Lansings’ thumb, she would always be under the Lansings’ thumb. She could run to London, the only way she was guaranteed not to end up in a war zone- where unexplained deaths were the norm- or under a destabilized government, a government all too willing to send her traitorous ass back home. She could run to London. She could run to London and run right into the Lansings’ pocket; the city wasn’t big enough to keep her hidden from them.

“Well OK then.” She sighs not caring, not knowing, who she’s cutting off. “I guess I’m staying, at least until someone tries to kill me, probably after that now too if we’re being realistic. If I have to spend the rest of my life trying not to get stabbed, I’d rather do it where I can take a hot shower at the end of the day and not in a war zone.”

“Well thank god for hot showers.” Will throws back at her angrily. “We’re all going to die but at least Mac gets to take a hot shower before then.”

“Will, no.” She tries to backpedal, flushed hot with shame at the slip. She wants to explain but she can’t, even without Charlie standing directly behind him there’s no way she can explain. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I, I’m a-”

She is sorry, but she’s more angry than sorry, a little confused, and Will must see that because he softens, sighs in frustration.

“You scare the fuck out of me, Mac.” He tells her plainly, waving Charlie off. “You’re always telling me you’re not going to open your mouth and say- and then you don’t even- keep your mouth shut if you’re not going to think before you open it.”

She wants to snap back, tell him it’s only like that with him, tell him he should stop hanging around her so damn much if he didn’t want her to feel safe. She wasn’t going to say anything to anyone, he knew that. He might not think she took the threat seriously enough, but he knew she wouldn’t do anything to endanger them, to endanger him. She wasn’t going to say anything, not even to him, especially not after she had refused to tell Charlie, because Charlie had had a meeting last week and the meeting hadn’t been with Leona, it had been with her. 

He had wanted to know what had happened in Moldova and she had smiled and calmly told him that he knew exactly what had happened in Moldova and while she wasn’t sure how he knew, she knew he knew and she had left it at that. She hadn’t asked him if he knew what it all meant, if he knew the government was playing with technology it didn’t understand, if he understood the magnitude of the backlash that would occur if the American public found out, not just about Moldova, because that was only the beginning, she was sure of that, but about it all, about the tens of ways they could all end up dying because someone somewhere couldn’t stand the thought of losing, of compromising, of backing off. It wasn’t just the arătare, the supernatural specters driven by the pain of what had once been human, it was bigger than that. Her story was just the beginning, the spark that would blow the lid off of the military’s clandestine operations. It was her only leverage, both dangerous, and a danger, and she wasn’t telling anyone.

“We could respond.” Charlie suggests when it’s clear she’s not going to say anything. “We could-”

“Spend the next six weeks tap dancing on the air.” Will cuts in with an apologetic smile. “It scares the hell out of me, but we’re in too deep. If we back off now we’re off the air. Either the Lansings pull the plug or the government finds a way to discredit us permanently. They’re not going to settle for quiet and meek, not after they’ve made sure the public knows they’re unhappy with the three of us.”

She doesn’t say anything just nods silently and lets her gaze fall to the floor, lets Charlie and Will hem and haw until, satisfied, Charlie leaves.

“You’re not kicking yourself for not finding it first are you?” He asks as the door swings shut leaving them alone.

“No.” She looks up, not at him directly, she can’t quite, not yet, but she does glance over at him, quickly taking in the set of his shoulder, the slightly inquisitive tilt to his posture. “No,” she shakes her head. “You would have wanted to see it anyway.”

“What?” He asks and she can hear the honest question in his voice. 

“Mac?” He pries gently, stepping forward until he’s directly in front of her. “What is it? I’m not angry if that’s-”

“No,” she says again this time with a sigh and she feels his finger tuck itself under her chin. She glances up not moving. “I’m sorry I keep scaring you.”

“That’s not-” he starts because that’s obviously not it, but she is sorry and he knows it. “I know. You don’t need to be. I know you’re scared to.”

When she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at him, he sighs, applies more pressure to the underside of her jaw until she meets his eye.

“It scares the hell out of me that you won’t- I just want you to say that you’re scared.” 

“I can’t.” She shakes her head as hard as she can with his hand cupping the side of her jaw. “I can’t.” She swallows and she sees it hit him, sees the pain she knows he’s always trying to hide behind his anger.

She turns away, tries to pull away but his hand is on her shoulder. He isn’t holding her. He would never hold her here, but it’s enough to keep her from stepping away, enough to let him wrap his arms around her.

She’s stiff, breathing carefully, head tipped just enough so she can count the ceiling tiles overhead. He’s soft and warm, breathing deeply, holding her carefully, cradling her as best he can, as if she’s already fallen apart and he’s the only thing holding her together. He runs his thumb across the curve of her cheekbone and she drops her gaze back to the broadcast, pressing the side of her face into his shoulder.

“You don’t need to watch that.” He whispers, but he can’t reach the projector from where he’s standing, and the feed is automated. There’s no way for him to turn it off, at best he could call out and have the system black it out but the void would still be there for her to stare at.

“Mac, don’t” He slides a hand over her eyes and she jerks away, encounters the resistance of his arm, and falls back against him with a panicked whimper. 

“Just close your eyes.” He tries again, brushing his fingertips over her eyelids, ignoring the sudden rapid thrumming of her pulse. “Just stand here for a minute and pretend we’re still alive, all right? Just let me hold you.”

*

“Get in the car, Mac.” He insists pointedly and she heaves a sigh, ducking down to squeeze in next to him.

“I can see myself home.” She reminds him, trying to ignore the heavy tick of the door as it snaps shut beside her. “Nice security, is it new?”

He snorts because she’s being flippant and maybe he deserves it for ordering her around, at least she assumes that’s what’s amusing him. 

“Before you came waltzing back like some sort of apocalyptic Disney princess, I was concerned about the people you’re befriending. Dissidents tend not to like government mouthpieces.”

“Zombie boomerang,” she corrects him, “the only person calling for the apocalypse is you.”

“Yeah,” he sighs, pressing his thumb into the panel before him. “I don’t think that’s entirely true. You look like hell Mac.” He reminds her before she can say anything. “When was the last time you slept?”

“About five years ago, before I turned thirty.” She quips despite the look on his face warning her not to. He’s being patient with her, but she can tell he’s getting worried, getting more worried the longer she refuses to take him seriously. “I had a rough night.”

“Several rough nights?”

It’s her turn to sigh now and she does so reluctantly, turning to squint out the narrow sliver of a window before them. “I’ve been in tanks with better views then this. Yes, I’m tired but it’s Friday. It’s fine. You didn’t have to drive me home to ask me how I’ve been sleeping.”

“Yeah well,” he shrugs and she thinks maybe he’s letting it drop until they pull up in front of her building and he slides out behind her.

“Will.” She’s protesting but he’s already gesturing toward the front door of her building. Not in the street. It wasn’t safe for both of them to be standing here like this. “Fine.”

She isn’t really mad at him. He’s always been protective, always worried about her and she hasn’t exactly been helping things lately. She isn’t mad at him but she gives him the cold shoulder, ignoring him until she’s shoved open the door to her apartment and then snapped it shut again, nearly catching the back of his sweater in the process.

She’s expecting him to start over, ask her when the last time she had slept had been, but he turns and disappears into her bathroom. 

She lets him go without comment and flicks on the TV- she always has it on, always on mute- and frowns intently at their DC broadcast. She keeps hoping one of their other nightly shows will pick up one of the stories they’ve run, one of the ones Will has taken to calling ‘run and gun’ pieces mostly because she knows he wants to remind her that he’s not being cavalier, but also because they tend to be short and hard hitting, tucked into the back half of the show somewhere.

She hears Will rummaging around and then hears his footsteps softened by the cork composite flooring that covers the apartment’s main living areas. He's lingering behind her somewhere, watching her as she frowns at yet another government mandated segment. 

“You do own actual pajamas don’t you?” He asks and she turns away from the TV to watch him as he steps closer. “All you have hanging in the bathroom is military cast offs.”

“They’re comfortable.” She frowns at him, refusing to say familiar, refusing to tell him she still hasn’t gone shopping to replace the wardrobe she had worn overseas. She had clothes to wear to the office, she had always kept those in storage, and a few pairs of workout clothes, the pjs he had bought her years ago, but most of what she had, most of what she had kept, she’d had with her in Moldova. 

It was an old habit, she wasn’t used to staying put, but she didn’t want to bring that up now, didn’t want to remind him that up until now she had always had one foot out of the door. She was staying, now that things were going to hell, now that she had nowhere else to go.

She didn't want to remind him of that though, didn't want to remind him that it wasn't exactly safe for her to spend an afternoon out shopping, not here, not anymore. She would need to though now that she was staying, now that Moldova was burrowing deeper in her mind, now that she couldn't stand the thought of slipping back into army sweats.

“Somewhere.” She admits when he stays silent, waiting for an answer. “It’s all sort of-”

“In boxes.” He offers, pressing at a panel to open the nearest compartment, “labeled boxes,” he flashes her a knowing smile. “Nowhere near where they’re supposed to be. Bedroom.” He points to the labeled stack of boxes in the cabinet beside him and then toward her bedroom proffering, “kitchen?”

“Shut it.” She grouses but she can’t help but smile reluctantly, stepping back so he can pull the boxes out and pop off the lids.

He finds the pajamas quickly, disregarding the first box when he sees the stack of towels at the top, and knocking the lid off the second, shoving his hand down the side of the box to pull out a pair of faded blue and green flannel bottoms and a gray t-shirt. 

“You pack so methodically it's unreasonable.” He teases, holding out the pajamas. “Are you going to put these on? I'm not really in the mood to wrestle you into them. I can help you finish unpacking Sunday, if you want.” He continues and she finds herself nodding just to keep up. 

“Sunday afternoon. Yeah, I can.” She circles back around mentally, grabbing the pajamas from him. “Feel free to stand there and watch.”

He rolls his eyes at her before turning to put the lids on the boxes. “Are you going to trip on these if I leave them out?”

“There's room in the cabinet.” She answers tugging the t-shirt down over her head. She hadn't bothered to unbutton her blouse. She'd slipped the first couple of buttons free and slid it over her head. Will would fuss at her for it when he went to hang it up, but she didn't care. She never bothered now that she had an extra chair, one that had found a second life as a clothes rail.

“Yeah I know that.” He says, turned away from her, fiddling with a box, waiting. “I’m the one who made the room.”

“Just-” she sighs and he picks up the bottom box. She had accepted his offer to help her unpack without thinking, she would have to find a way to put it off, but right now she wanted things to go back to normal, right now she wanted nothing more than a pot of strong coffee or a couple of stimulant pills and he seemed to know that.

He slides the last box into place and knocks the cabinet door shut as she fusses with the tie on her pants, tangling it helplessly until he lays his hands over hers, tugs the knot free. “How long have you been up?”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. It’s been over a week since she had pressed her forehead into his shoulder and tried to ignore the feeling of his arms wrapped snug around her. If she had slept at all since then, it hadn’t been for long.

“I’m just going to-” She stops when she feels his hand on her arm.

“Here,” he murmurs and for a second she feels a sense of deja vu, his finger curled under her chin, the warmth in his eyes. “Let me.”

For a moment she’s confused and then she spots the towelette he must have left on the table while he had waited behind her.

“Will,” she’s already whining before he’s gotten anywhere near her with the thing. She’s played this game before and she isn’t interested in his scolding even if he didn’t mean anything by it. Not to mention she hates the damn towelettes even if they did a better job of removing her makeup than the soap and washcloth she insists on using.

“Shhh,” he whispers aiming for placating, but his grip on her chin is decidedly more coercive, if just as gentle.

He swipes at her undereyes and she squeezes her eyes shut, lets him repeat the gesture knowing the dark smudges are turning into dark circles, bruised and sore looking. He swipes along her lash line, smearing her mascara and she reflexively tries to back away. He catches her, holds her by the elbow until he’s sure she’s not going anywhere and then wipes the blush from her cheek, cups her jaw and tugs at her bottom lip with his thumb.

She had been chewing on it unconsciously. She winces, mentally chastises herself, waiting for his scolding to start, but he’s quiet, working gently, methodically until he’s satisfied he’s cleaned her up. 

“I’d throw you in the shower too.” He mutters lightly, almost teasing, “but you need the sleep more.”

“I showered this morning.” She grouses before she realizes that that had been the point of his comment. He wanted her talking, distracted as he steered her toward the bed.

“It’s too early.” She digs her heels in, his gentle prodding not budging her from the doorway.

“It’s almost ten thirty. If you’re up early you can make it to that pop up market you like.”

“Will.” She’s shaking her head, trying to find a way to tell him she doesn’t even want to try. She’s terrified to close her eyes even though she knows she shouldn’t be. The threat was out there, lurking somewhere, not in here. There were no invisible specters, no arătare to freeze her to her core.

“I’ll sit with you.” He promises and for a second she’s tempted by a ghost of the past, the gentle way he used to comb his fingers through her hair while she unburdened herself, spoke the horror into the black of his apartment. She had always spent her days running from something, but there had been nights when her feet couldn’t carry her far enough, fast enough, when the thought of another conflict zone, another war terrified her, provided her her only comfort. There had always been nights like tonight, except now, even now, she wasn’t safe, here with him. “Just until you fall asleep.”

“Will.” She pleads, but he presses softly, insistently against her shoulder blades and she feels herself take a step, and another to move away from the hand that curls to brush her hair behind her ear.

She reaches the bed and sits facing him, making it harder for him to push her in to anything. She’s being more stubborn than she should be, making him worry, but she’s too exhausted to find another way out of this.

He stands for a moment considering, ruling out the bed as a place to sit, looking for an alternative. There isn’t one, so he leaves, comes back with the chair she had thrown her blouse on and places it as close to the head of the bed as he can without boxing her in.

“I’ll spare you the sermon.” He promises as he settles in. “but I can’t promise you won’t get an earful about Nan instead.”

She can’t remember who Nan is, not that it matters, even if she wonders briefly if he means Jan from whatever they’re calling the General Accountability Office these days. He’d never been good with names, but right now that didn’t matter because he’s filling in the gaps from the last three years and it feels familiar enough, this ritual they’ve neglected, that she finds herself caught up in it. Finds herself shifting farther onto the bed so he can prop his feet up where she had been sitting.

*

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when she wakes up there’s a note, a paper note folded into a neat upright triangle on the table next to her with a glass of water. Went out to grab breakfast. Be right back. - W

“Will?” She calls, suddenly panicked when she hears her front door open. He would have needed her keycard or the combination to get it open and for a second she wonders if it’s someone else but then she hears him humming to himself, something old and peppy and then he’s there holding out a bag, jiggling it excitedly as he waits for her to catch up.

“I watched the guy make them myself.” He grins like they do this every weekend, like the novelty isn’t an almost forgotten joke between the two of them. “Here.”

He drops the bag into her lap, sets a mug onto the bedside table and takes the seat he had vacated the night before. She unrolls the top of the bag and gasps at the flaky confection she’s presented with. It’s stuffed mainly with spiced potatoes, not the meat or cheese she’s normally guaranteed, but she hums appreciatively as she scarfs it down, starts in on the second, before stopping mortified. “This wasn’t supposed to be yours was it? Oh god Will, I’m sorry.”

He’s laughing, lightly, still smiling. “I bought you two. I know you hate the stuff they feed you here.”

“I-” she frowns a little, rests the half-eaten crescent on top of the bag. “How?”

“If you hadn’t told me years ago?” He leans back with an easy shrug. “The face you make when you dump coffee into your mug at the office is a good place to start. You got paid enough to rent a nice place inside the beltway but you’ve had that apartment in the ghetto for years. The only person on base you bother befriending is the cook. Every base. Every time.” He insists gently when she looks like she might protest. 

“You’ve been losing weight since you got here and it’s not from stress. You ate the entire plate of holiday cookies Jenna baked you before we even made it to the eleven o’clock rundown.”

“I-” she sighs with narrowed eyes before popping the last of the food into her mouth with an appreciative hum. “You went home and showered.”

“I did.”

“And then you stopped by to check on me before you went and got breakfast.”

“Just for you. Including that sludge.” He waves a hand toward the mug and she grabs at it, groaning happily.

There were several grades of coffee substitutes, each one more disgusting, more potent than the last. To most people this would be the worst, dregs left over from military rations, almost as potent but twice as bitter, biting and burnt tasting, carefully threading the line between addictive and dangerous.

“It tastes like home.” She tells him firmly as he forgoes the usual joke, neglects to mention that home for most of her life had officially been some variation on the whitewashed skyscrapers like the ones that line this street.

“You really should get more sleep, but I couldn’t resist. I knew,” he shrugs. He had wanted to see her smile. She wonders when that had become a consideration, if she had stopped smiling, or if this was something else. She never could tell with him, would never know until she asked and she wasn’t ready to know, wasn’t ready to face the possibility that he still hadn’t forgiven her.

“We could maybe,” she pauses, not sure she wants to offer, but needing to give him something in return. “I know you said tomorrow, but.”

“Those boxes?”

“Well,” she shrugs, takes another sip from her mug. “It would be nice to be a bit more. It would be nice to be able to find things again.”

*

They’re still unpacking boxes late in the afternoon, when her intercom flashes red. She doesn’t own much, but they keep stopping to laugh over something, get lost in a memory. They’ve made it through a couple of boxes but she doubts they’ll finish today.

The intercom flashes again and she’s tempted to ignore it, make an excuse to go over and silence it before Will notices but the she sees the pattern, the quick series of flashes that meant Charlie had been trying to get ahold of her.

“We need to go into the office.” She stands brushing off her pants with quick swipes and then reaches down to help him off the floor. “I’ve been offline and Charlie, we need to go.”

It’s another big military push, another offensive front. Will’s covered this a thousand time so she lets him take the lead as she downs a second cup of coffee. He’ll lay into her later when he remembers but right now they’re trying to line up the facts, not the ones the government’s provided, but the ones they need from people on the ground.

They won’t report most of this tonight. They’ll send out the press release as expected, but they need this information now while it still exist, before her sources go underground.

She makes call after call, switching between languages and time zones, jotting down notes on her tablet, Will peering over her shoulder, occasionally offering a comment, asking for clarification. He disappears for a while to go on the air, read off the copy neither of them had written, applaud a job well done while she works furiously to find out what they had destroyed, why they had destroyed it. It wouldn’t matter to most people but she needed to know, knew there were others who would want to know.

She’s on hold with a government official in Berlin when Will reappears, still in his suit and tie to take the seat beside her.

“That isn’t English.” He points at her tablet and she rolls her eyes, circling the text, double tapping to overlay the translation she quickly scribbles in.

“That still doesn’t make sense.”

She scrolls up, jabbing at something she had previously written and picks up the conversation she had been having before he’d walked in. She finishes up the call, jots down a couple of notes at the bottom of the memo sheet and stifles a yawn.

“It’s almost 4am. I just taped the segment for the morning show. Please tell me we can go to bed now.”

“You can-” she starts and then cuts herself off as he reaches for the mug she had been about to grab. “It’s water.”

“I told Jenna-”

“She’s the one who brought it to me. I haven’t touched coffee in hours, and yes I mean that literally.” She frowns at him for emphasis. “Why do you think I keep yawning?”

He tips the mug down to inspect it anyway before handing it to her. “Can I crash on your couch?”

“There’s a couch upstairs in Elliot’s office.”

“There’s a couch in your apartment.”

“There’s a couch in your apartment.” She says pointedly despite knowing he’s going to ignore her.

“Yours is closer.”

“By five minutes.”

“It’s four in the morning.” He's almost whining now, not out of actual distress but because he knows she can't stand the sound when she's been up all night hopped up on liquid adrenaline.

“All right. Fine. My couch is now your couch, just don’t trip on any of the boxes we left out.”

He grins, charmingly, not at all the satisfied smirk she had expected and she smiles back weakly, tiredly as he holds out a hand and tugs her deftly to her feet.

“I promise not to snore.”

*

She had left him to deal with the Lansings. It had been a week of meetings, of broadcasts filled with the urge to glance back over her shoulder knowing they were watching. They wanted her to push more, she knew that despite the fact they had mostly been complimentary, highlighting some of the show’s harder hitting segments. They had offered a bigger budget, a bigger staff. She had declined both much to Charlie’s chagrin and left the office right after the broadcast. She still had work to do but it was Friday and Will could make excuses for her if he felt she needed them. 

She had wanted to disappear without saying anything. She hadn’t wanted to tempt him into showing up at her place after he had seen the Lansings off, but she had told him anyway, partway through the broadcast, that she was leaving directly after the show. 

She had told him she was leaving so she could spend the night alone. She hadn’t expected not to hear from him at all. When Saturday morning slips into Saturday evening and she can’t reach him, when she still can’t reach him, she calls Charlie. She isn’t panicking, not yet, but there’s an ache in her chest that she’s having a hard time ignoring. She calls Charlie and she has to force herself not to beg, to ask the question and pay attention, careful attention to everything he says.

“Are you sure?” She asks, tries not to ask again and then sighs, hangs up, sits slumped on the couch with a hand pressed over her eyes trying to remember how to count backward from one hundred in Malay. There was a trick to it she couldn’t remember and that worried her. Seratus, sembilan puluh sembilan, Sembilan puluh lapan, sembilan puluh tujuh. She lets the numbers slip through her mind, tries to remember. Lapan puluh tahun. Tujuh puluh. She stumbles around sixty and again at fifty before giving up and going to make herself a cup of caffeine substitute, it’s weak and over-sweetened but she chugs it down to stop herself from checking the clock again. It’s almost two AM.

The buzzer for her door chimes and she hits the release before she’s had a chance to think. She’s being reckless but she’s too distracted to care. It takes two and a half minutes to make it from the front entrance to her apartment assuming the elevator’s waiting. She takes a seat on the couch and props her feet up, frowns through the shadows to her front door.

It’s Will. She recognizes the shape of him, the weary slant to his shoulders as he looks around trying to spot her in the gloom.

“Mac?” He’s confused. She had buzzed him up. She should be waiting. 

“On the couch.” 

“You’re sitting in the dark.”

“Yeah.” She sets her feet back on the floor with a thump. He’s still standing silhouetted in the doorway waiting, she assumes, for her to turn on a light.

“I didn’t wake you did I?” He asks confusion beginning to color his words and she feels anger beginning to bubble up.

“Was I?” She repeats, stabbing at the control panel on the wall to bring the lights up over by the door. “Was I sleeping? Will- What is wrong with you?”

She doesn’t remember grabbing the pillow, the one that had been sitting on her couch since he had crashed there after the broadcast last month but she’s hitting him with it before he can respond.

“Mac, would you- Stop hitting me.” He makes a grab for the pillow, quickly giving up when he realizes he’s only making it easier for her to beat him over the head, and takes hold of her forearm instead.

“Oww.” She yelps, trying to stomp on his foot when her efforts to yank her arm free fail. He isn’t hurting her so much as refusing to let go, but it’s the best she can do to get under his skin, and that’s all she wants right now. 

He sidesteps her foot, using the distraction to shift his grip to her wrist. It wouldn’t take much for her to dislodge his grasp if she would let go of the pillow but it’s become as much shield as weapon so she clings to it, growling angrily when he yanks at it.

“Mac, would you-” He manages to keep his voice even, pitched low, despite the strained note, the quick breath he takes as she pulls away again. “Mac.”

He releases the pillow and she teeters, caught off balance as he shifts his weight not to compensate for her, but to step around her. She tries again to stomp on his foot but finds herself careening back against him, both her wrists held in his hands, his feet once again safely out of the way.

“Damn it, Will.”

He lets her struggle panting for a minute before he replies, a quiet huff against her ear that only doubles her desire to smack him bare handed across the face.

“What the hell were you-” she doesn’t finish. She isn’t expecting an answer, let alone an honest one. “Let go.”

“Tell me what happened and I’ll let you go.” He promises, pressing closer behind her.

“Tell you- tell you? I haven’t heard from you all day and you want-” She lets him cut her off, hating how shrill she sounds, how close to tears she suddenly is.

“I went upstate. I left early. I should have told you I was going but I didn’t want you to worry.” He apologizes, keeps talking as she starts to calm down. “I had no idea my comm had shorted out until I got home and saw you’d called two dozen times. I came straight here.”

“You could have called.” 

“Should I have?” He asks with a note of humor she can’t imagine mustering.

“I needed some air.” He continues more quietly, shifting her wrists to one hand so he can wrap an arm around her waist. “I knew you wouldn’t let me go, but,” he sighs into her hair, squeezes her lightly. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought.” She whispers, trailing off.

“I know. I should have- I’m sorry.” He soothes. “I know you’ve been worried and I should have been more considerate of that. It’s been a hell of a week. I knew you needed some time but I should have called you before I left this morning. I should have called and asked about Lisbon at the very least. Last night-.”

“Steve’s fine. Libby’s shaken up.” She cuts in with more irritation than she should. He isn’t changing the subject, he’s honestly concerned and not only for her. “Sheila's livid that he allowed her to go with him but she’s almost sixteen. She can’t live her entire life in the English countryside pretending to have her head in the sand.”

“Half the city-” Will shakes his head. “I know the two of you grew up in- there were massive explosions.”

“This is the world we grew up in. You were, you remember before but I- Sheila needs to pretend that things are different so she has hope that they’re safe. It’s delusional but there’s a part of Steve that loves her for it even if it means she spent an hour screaming at him on the phone.”

“He told you that?” 

“I didn’t talk to him. I called Mary. I’ve told you before. Steven calls our mother, she calls Mary because Mary’s the practical one who stays where she’s put, and she calls the Priscillas.” She ticks her siblings off mentally. “I call her when I can if I haven’t already talked to my dad.”

“The prisses Sophia and Charlotte.” Will chuckles at the nickname. “What if Mary has an emergency?”

“Mary doesn’t have emergencies.”

“But what if-?” Will insists and she shrugs, twisting her wrists, waiting for him to react, but he only shifts his weight slightly to lean into her. “She’d call our mother who would call Steven who would track me down and entirely forget about Char and Soph and possibly our dad who would already be on a plane back from wherever he was intent on fixing things because Mary doesn’t have emergencies.”

“You’re remarkably sanguine about all this.” He shakes his head. “I thought last night when the story broke, with Leona, the Lansings. I thought maybe you were distracted, that it hadn’t sunk in.”

“It’s not an emergency until someone tells me it is and even then, if I can’t do anything about it, I can’t worry about it. It’s like everything else, Will. They’re my family and I love them, but- it would be like you going on the air and crying every time we had breaking news about an attack somewhere.”

He frowns at her, a little darkly as she turns to face him, but doesn’t say anything. She knew it still bothered him, all the violence and bloodshed. He made a good show of it on air and in the office, but he wasn’t numb to it in the way the rest of them were, certainly wasn’t immune in the way he seemed to think she was. “So he’s all right?”

“He has two weeks left in his rotation at the hospital then he’s taking Libby to Sintra for the weekend before they head home.”

“And you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.” She shifts, letting his hand slip from her back to her hip as he compensates for the space she’s created.

“You’re only up because you thought I-”

“Yeah, Will.”

He ignores the sharpness of her tone, still concerned. “It’s not Moldova?”

“I just told you-”

“If it’s not Moldova or Lisbon then what? It’s not me.”

“Why not you?” She smiles like she means it, she does mean it, but he knows her well enough to know she’s stalling.

“Something’s been bothering you. What is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“I can’t help if-”

“What if I don’t want-”

“Don’t go there.” He warns, fingers curling into her side.

“I’m fine.”

“It’s been a year and a half, Mac.” He reminds her. “You don’t hang on to stuff, not like this. You haven’t said a word.”

“You know I can’t tell you what happened.” 

“What about the six months, the year before that? There are two years of your life that don’t exist, Mac.”

“Before Moldova.” She grins like this is easy, like this is what she thinks he wants to hear when she knows it’s not. “I spent forty eight hours in Omsk. I had a meeting with an old friend. We were supposed to meet in Moscow but she got held up.”

“Not stopovers.” He says softly. He’s not pushing, he's trying to ease her into it, come at it from another direction. She doesn't know why he's bothering. He's going to have to ask her outright if he's expecting to hear anything like an explanation for while she’s still hovering here.

“DC,” she chokes a bit on the name. “I spent a couple of-”

“That was almost a year before. You’ve had to have spent more than a couple of days-”

“London.” She smiles, remembering. “Steve took the train in with the girls. We went shopping. Sheila made a roast, insisted I spend a couple of days lounging around the back garden before I had to get back to the city, file a couple of stories. I spent almost a week I think. The weather was great. It must have been summer. I was headed to- No, it was fall then; I had already been back to Nigeria.”

“Was there something about Nigeria?” He asks, knowing she must use it as a reference point for a reason. Her sense of time tended to warp when she traveled around as much as she did, the time zones and seasons blurring into one another, but she always had these touchstones, the moments that stayed suspended in perfect alignment.

“No,” she shakes her head as she feels his arm slide back around her waist. “Just fond memories of Steven being a prat. It was a pretty uneventful year,” she continues with a wry smile. “No near death experiences unless you count choking on Sheila’s lemonade while Libby threatened to reinvent the Heimlich.”

“And Moldova.” He reminds her and she heaves a sigh. 

“That was the next year. The next calendar year. You remember, those things with the days all lined up in rows in those pesky groups called months.” She snipes, feeling his arm tighten in warning. “This isn’t about Moldova.”

“Not Moldova.” He echoes, “but you know you can-”

“God, Will,” she cuts him off. “There are two hundred other countries on the planet.”

“I know.” He reaches between them to catch the hand she’s left fluttering in the air. “I wasn’t trying to- I’m here OK. That’s all. All right?”

He waits until she takes a breath and nods before he lets her hand go. “It’s late. I should.”

“Yeah.” She pulls back, turns around to pick the pillow up from where he had tossed it. “You should probably call-”

He clears his throat and she looks over, raises her eyebrows at the sudden shift in his posture.

“Could I get a glass of water before I go?” He asks and she wonders if he means a hug, because he looks like he wants one, like he might suddenly need one.

“Yeah, I’ll-” She starts and then she remembers, realizes what he’s seen. She’d forgotten about the pile of boxes crammed into her dining area, the suitcase spilled open across the floor, the plants she had lined up along the wall. 

“I didn’t want the kids to get hurt.” She shrugs trying to brush it off, knowing that he’s watching her. “I paid them to box it up. The rent’s paid through to the end of the year but I broke the lease anyway. It’s safer that way, if my name stops showing up.”

“Oh MacKenzie.” She hears him whisper as she turns away, low and quiet, like maybe she wasn’t supposed to hear, but she had and the words ache in her throat as she steps farther away, out of the glare of the light by the door toward the sink, toward the shelf of glasses he had used as an excuse.

He hadn’t told her she needed to take things more seriously since that night in his office, but the thought of it still stings. She had been taking it seriously although he hadn’t seen that until now, hadn’t realized it would come to this. The apartment had been her refuge. She had always run there after a big fight, spending the few remaining days until her overseas posting came through on her couch, picking at its tattered edges trying to find a way to say she was sorry when she wasn’t sorry, even if she regretted the things she had said. 

It was all gone now, the couch and the cracked tile in the corner of the shower, the rusty hinges on the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen. It’s almost too much for her to think about, such a little thing to so many people but she couldn’t bare the thought of it, the sight of Will at her stove, frying eggs, laughing with Mattie who had been giving him a hard time about ‘his lady’ on that one blessed morning: the only time he had come to visit her in DC.

“It’s all right, Will.” She can see him trying to take it all in, trying to process it fast enough to catch up, to find some way to comfort her.

“When?”

“Tuesday.” She lets her shoulders drop, fills up the glass. “Before work.”

He curses under his breath still watching her.

Had she known the timing was going to be this bad she would have waited another week, but she hadn’t known about the Lansings, had wanted, at the start, to get it over with. 

“You should have said something.”

“That wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“I would have known.”

“Will-” 

He shakes his head, frustrated, and she bites her lip, quiets herself for a moment to let him breathe as she crosses the space between them. “I’m OK.”

“You should have told me.”

“You couldn’t have done anything.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“Yes it is.” She’s emphatic but she tries to be gentle. It hurts to be standing here talking about this like it’s real, like it had happened, was happening, but it was hurting him too and at least she could do something about that. “You had other things to worry about.”

“Fuck that.” He spits out and she finds she can’t quite reach out and lay her hand on his arm. He’s angry, not at her, he wouldn’t blame her for keeping this to herself, but he was angry and that made her edgy.

“I’m not- I’m sorry.” He softens when he sees her hesitate. “Come here, please.” He adds softly, holding out a hand so he can tug her to him, slip his fingers into the hair loose at the back of her neck. “I never wanted-”

“I know.” She sighs deep before inhaling, drawing in the scent of him, trying to remember, just in case. “I know you wanted me here, but not like this. I know.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You have quite the following.” He shrugs easily in a good imitation of nonchalance. “Someone will step up. It won’t go anywhere. It would be a waste, but at least the story would be out there. I’m taking this all very seriously. If you refuse to believe everything else, believe that, Mac. This story is going to air. I came to you first because I’d rather it be done right. It’s not any more complicated than that. Air the story. The Lansings will roll out the red carpet. You’ll be their golden child.”
> 
> “I’ll be the second horseman and you’ll be living under a rock.”
> 
> “Then so be it. Air the story or someone else will. Any other questions?”

“Your hand to hand is a little lacking.” He reminds her, standing in front of her couch like two weeks hadn’t passed.

“I was angry.” She frowns at him, when he gives her a look that suggests the proclamation should have been unnecessary. “Anyone who’s trying to kill me is going to bother pissing me off first.”

“Mac.”

“Surprise me and I’ll punch you.” She reminds him, ignoring the interruption, and he reaches reflexively to touch his nose while she laughs, “so much for your lightning reflexes.”

“You surprised me.” He grouses good-naturedly at the well worn joke. “I was a little addled. I wasn’t expecting the girl I had just taken to bed to throw a punch, let alone manage to hit me square in the face.”

“Taken to bed.” She narrows her eyes at his irreverent choice of words.

“Had mind-numbingly awesome sex with.” He fills in with a grin that calls to mind exactly what he’s remembering. “You hadn’t warned me yet that you’d had hand to hand training.”

“Everybody has.” She reminds him. “And besides, it hadn’t seemed relevant at the time. We were a little more concerned with other things.” 

“How about now?” He asks teasing, before growing serious, raising his arms in front of himself. “Arms up.”

“It’s-”

“I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night.” He cuts her off with a determined frown. “I may not like it, but if f this is the world we live in- humor me.”

She pulls a face, but steps closer, into striking range, and sighs as she raises her arms, lets him wrap his fingers around her wrists, lightly at first and then more tightly.

It’s a simple maneuver, twist and pull. She could surprise him and step forward with a raised knee, he wouldn’t be expecting that, but she didn’t want him thinking she’s being cocky, not taking this seriously.

She wasn’t safe. He may have stopped reminding her, but he hadn’t forgotten. He wanted to know she could protect herself. It was ridiculous to think something like this would do much good, but there’s comfort in the familiarity of the motions, the drills she had run through on every return trip to the US as a child.

Again and again, one hand and then two, a single wrist, both, one and then the other. The skin on her wrists is chaffed by the time he steps back, brushing a hand against his forehead.

“If they get up close.” He tells her and she feels her skin crawl with the familiar shivering of fear she feels in the dark.

“They were so close.” She whispers and she sees him freeze. He couldn’t have expected her to say anything, couldn’t have expected her to say that, but he knows her well enough to see the signs, to know where this is going.

He takes another step back, sits heavily on the couch, but she stays where she is, staring at him vacantly, her heart in her throat. She shouldn’t, but she’s shaking, shaken up. It hadn’t happened like this before. She had never blinked and seem the shimmering blue of their form.

“There were these spirits.” She winces at the inadequacy of the word. “They were. I can’t explain. You could repel them with iron, but you were screwed unless you wanted to carry around a ceramic bathtub and even then.”

She’s rambling a little, she should stop, she wants them to stop, but he’s so far away and they’re so close. “I’d had close calls, but there was always a chance- this time I knew. There was no way. There was no way, I-” She coughs, forcing herself to swallow the lump in her throat. “It all happened so fast there wasn’t time to feel anything. It was too late to be terrified.”

He waits for her to say more, not wanting to prompt her, sound like he was prodding, but there isn’t anything else to say, there isn’t anything else she can say without giving too much away. It wasn’t her imminent death that scared her, although it had in the beginning, but the horror of what they had found in the lab, the tanks she and Clyde had systematically smashed, the equipment they had obliterated until they had heard the calls of special ops teams growing uncomfortably close. She had offered Clyde a pragmatic out, and he hadn’t blinked; some things were too horrific to be seen in the light of day, to be shared.

“I can’t- it’s probably classified and even if it’s not- I see them sometimes at night, in the dark, in the shadows. It’s not, I’m not- it’s my imagination playing tricks on me. It’s getting better. I- it’s hard being the only one.”

She sighs and looks away. She knows he won’t think she’s lying but she still doesn’t want to see the disbelief written across his face. It was getting better, but it had taken her this long to tell him. She doesn’t want him to ask why, to ask her what had changed, because it wasn’t this, the boxes and the missing furniture, but rather him, or more aptly them she thinks, and the fact that she can’t bear the thought of him not knowing, of not telling him everything.

*

She doesn’t understand what he’s saying the first time she plays the message through, but the second time it’s clear. “Tomorrow. You know the place.”

Mark Clyne was in town. He was in town and she didn’t trust him. He was here and she was meeting him because she did know the place, he had mentioned it to her once over coffee in the canteen, a tree at the north end of the park. The time he had left up to her, her lunch break, four o’clock. If he had found a way of calling her without being traced, he had a way of finding that out to.

“I don’t trust you.” She figures she should get that out in the open, preempt whatever notion he has about what she’s doing here.

“But you came.”

“You saved my life. I figured if you wanted to get me killed we’d be even.”

“You saved my life. I think we’re more than even.”

“If you think that’s fair.” She’s being glib, but he takes her at her word. 

“I’m in town for work. There’s a conference. No one knows I’m here,” he assures her, sliding over on the bench so she can take a seat next to him.

“No one knows.”

“I know you’ve seen the press. I haven’t breathed a word about you even after that little stunt you pulled last year.”

“I had to-”

“I know. I’ve seen the press.” He smiles darkly. “I hope you’re not in over your head.”

He isn’t being polite. It would look like that from the outside, but they had spent enough time together in Moldova, in the few weeks he had spent there, for her to know better. “What difference-?”

“You need to run the story.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.” He isn’t looking at her although he is still smiling, just in case she realizes.

“You’re talking about-”

“Treason.” He interrupts again and she has to bite her tongue to stop from telling him to stop putting words in her mouth. “You’re already on the shit list.”

“Mildly speaking.”

“If you were thinking of getting out of this alive-”

“Go out with a bang.” She fills in dryly. “Who says I was planning on walking?”

“You’ll have to eventually. You couldn’t before, but you’re not suicidal.”

“There was no way to know-”

“I can’t walk away any more than you could. I’m not delusional.” He butts in again. “I know I work on military projects. I know they aren’t all used for defense. I’m disillusioned, not delusional, MacKenzie. I can’t do anything to change my situation, but you can. You can report the story.”

“I can’t.” She says emphatically. “You know I can’t. That’s the one line I can’t cross.”

“Because it’ll get you killed.”

“You think that’s all I’m worried about?”

“There’s more to the story.”

“Is there?”

“I know you know there is.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“I would go on the record, on camera.”

“And then walk back on everything you’ve said when someone comes to knock on your door in the middle of the night.”

“Don’t trust me, then, if I’m the only person in this country who can say whatever the hell they want without consequence. You trust your contacts.” It isn’t a question. “Ask them. Mention my name. Don’t ask for any specifics. They’ll tell you there’s more. It’s not just Moldova, but you already knew that.”

“Who?” She doesn’t bother denying it. She tells herself it’s out of expediency, the longer they sit here the worse it looks, if someone’s watching, when someone’s watching, but there’s a part of her that’s wondering maybe, maybe because she had always known, despite the lack of concrete facts and now, if-

“Berlin, Mumbai, Madrid.” He lists off the cities, places she has contacts, people in important positions, government ministers and aides–de–camp. He’s not more specific, naming names, he’s too cautious for that and she’s thankful, because while it sounds more like a set up this way, and she’s not sure that it isn’t, she’s relieved he’s being smart. If he was right, if, there was too much at stake to risk it all before she even got started.

“And if I say no?”

“You won’t.”

“If I do.” She presses.

“You have quite the following.” He shrugs easily in a good imitation of nonchalance. “Someone will step up. It won’t go anywhere. It would be a waste, but at least the story would be out there. I’m taking this all very seriously. If you refuse to believe everything else, believe that, Mac. This story is going to air. I came to you first because I’d rather it be done right. It’s not any more complicated than that. Air the story. The Lansings will roll out the red carpet. You’ll be their golden child.”

“I’ll be the second horseman and you’ll be living under a rock.”

“Then so be it. Air the story or someone else will. Any other questions?”

*

She doesn’t believe him at first, she refuses to, but the following week she’s on a call with an old acquaintance in Mumbai and she mentions Clyde’s name. Slips it in to prove to herself, to dispel the notion that he’s anything but bitter, but then she hears the pause, the telltale hesitance, the denial that comes a beat too late. There was no Mike Clyde. Mark, she fails to correct, wondering what it is he knows that she’s about to find out.

It happens again two weeks later on a call with a government official in Prague, the silence on the other end of the line, a quick cough and the misstep, Kline this time. She tries again in Berlin a couple of days later, starts to make her way down the list slowly over the next two weeks until halfway through a call with Masha, she realizes, “Mike Kline,” she asks, “I met him after we talked in Omsk.”

“He has some stories,” Masha confirms with much less hesitance than she had expected, “tall like the yeti, but perhaps more true.”  
“Doveryai no proveryai.” Trust but verify.

Masha laughs, the same amused laugh she always had when the truth was too close to the surface. 

“The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” She quotes in careful English. “Be careful, Asya. The truth can be a sad consolation prize.”

*

When she sends Maggie to Uganda she has to explain. With Jim gone and Sloan leaving for what he thinks is a couple of weeks in Japan she knows it won’t be long before he realizes she’s emptying the office of senior staff.

“There’s a story.” She tells him quietly, leaning across his desk as he pages through a report she had given him for a segment in that night’s show. “I can’t tell you anything about it. Not yet. It’s not-” she waves a hand dispelling the notion. “I don’t need you for the red team; it’s nothing like that. It’s just,” she shrugs, smiles, doesn’t bother to mention she needs him alive long enough to get the story to air. “I’ll let you know when I have something more concrete.”

“Like the building you’re trying not to drop on our heads.” He notes dryly not looking up and she sighs.

“It’s a little bit dangerous but-”

“What isn’t?” He supplies as he glances at her. “I won’t waste my breath trying to talk you out of it since you’ve so cleverly taken the pin out of the grenade already.”

“I wasn’t trying to-” she cuts in before he can wander too far down that path. “It wasn’t like that, I-”

“You can’t, could never, keep either one of us safe, Mac.”

He sounds tired and she wonders fleetingly if he is or if she’s the reason he seems so worn around the edges. Had he known about the story, somehow, or was he still worried about her, worried about what she had told him, the blue specters that were fading from her mind to be replaced by other horrors.

“I know. Can’t I-” she heaves a sigh and doesn’t finish, doesn’t say pretend, because she’s never been any good at that. “I need some time.”

“Yeah,” he looks up at her then, right at her. “You always do.”

*

He knows about the story, so he knows that she’s been putting it together, alone as far as he can tell, spending every waking moment in the office. She’s spending every waking moment at the office yet she hasn’t said a word to him about what it was she was working on.

She would have to tell him, and tell him soon, but for right now she wanted him in the dark. She didn’t want to have to explain, she was in too deep, too muddled in the facts to try to pull them back apart. She would start drawing them together, sorting them out soon, but until then she needed him to leave her alone, which is why, she figured, he was currently standing in her lobby incessantly pressing the button for the buzzer she’s trying to ignore.

“What?” She finally snaps into the intercom, knowing it must be him, knowing she’s going to have to let him up because otherwise, eventually, security was going to say something and while he won’t make a fuss, she doesn’t want to deal with that.

“Let me up.”

“I’m a little busy.”

“Mac.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know it’s been a long a week.”

She really doesn’t want to be having this conversation, especially not through an intermediary, but she knows he’s going to have this conversation with her even if he has to stand in the lobby of her building for twenty minutes to do it.

“Fine, but you can’t stay.”

She buzzes him up and then waits, pacing by the door.

“I’m not staying,” he holds up a hand, placating, as he kicks of his shoes. “They just washed the floors downstairs. I don’t want the goo on your floor.”

“Right.” She says with a nod. “You were saying.”

“You were headed to bed.” He sighs apologetically, noticing, she realizes, the t-shirt and rolled up pants turned shorts she had replaced her skirt and blouse with out of necessity more than intent. “It’s late. I should have-”

“I wasn’t expecting you. “What is it?”

“What’s what?” He asks and she squints at him, waiting until he frowns back at her to roll her eyes. 

“You’re worried about something.”

“You.”

“No, I meant still. You’re still worried about something, right now. What is it?”

“It’s all right.” He steps forward, closer to her, lays a hand on her arm. “You should get some rest. You look-.”

“Will. Don’t. You wanted-” She sighs, but she knows she can’t push him. If he didn’t want to tell her, if he didn’t want to burden her, worry her, there wasn’t anything she could do to change his mind. She would find out eventually, things with Will always came out, but if he didn’t want to tell her tonight there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

“You’re pushing.” He says. That’s all he says, but she knows what he means, knows what he’s implying, knows where he thinks this is headed. She’s pushing him away.

“I am not.” She says trying not to sound defensive. “I’m- it’s this story.” She sighs, rubbing at her eyes. “I’m up at 3am every morning making phone calls.”

“You’re still up,” he’s leaning down again, trying to pick up his shoes. She kicks at his hand, gently, prodding with her toes until he lets her shove the shoes aside. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve been saying that a lot lately.” He observes as he straightens, fixes her with a look that lets her know he’s being serious.

“I’m tired.” she admits, “but this is important. It’s Moldova but it’s more than that. This is the biggest thing any of us will ever touch. It’s the Pentagon Papers and we’re the only ones who can air it.”

“The biggest thing we’ll ever touch. I suppose it’s about time I think about retiring.”

“No, Will,” she protests, but there’s a part of her relieved that he hadn’t immediately jumped to, because we’ll all be dead. It was more likely the staff would be jailed but she’s relieved he doesn’t mention that either because she’s too far into this now, now that she knows it’s all true.

“Is this why you called Steve last week?”

“How did you?” She steps backward into her apartment, waits for him to follow.

“You could be calling him about Armageddon and he’d still find a way to tease you. Your cheeks were pink when you got off the phone.”

“He was calling about the story we had aired on the Kenyan villages. He has a friend- I let him know he was all right, he was the guy we used to-” Will nods and she stops, tugs restlessly at the hem of her shirt. “I should have asked you before.”

“I trust you.”

“I’m not worried about a fake story.” She cautions him but he doesn’t seem to care.

“Neither am I, Mac. We’re only as credible as our last story. We always knew there would-”

“No.” She cuts him off, shaking her head. “There doesn’t have to be.”

“I knew the day you walked into my office that this couldn’t go on forever and you did too. Charlie’s stunt bought us some time, but no one lives long enough on American soil to do any real damage to the government.”

“You let me-”

“You didn’t talk me into anything. You didn’t say anything I hadn’t said myself. I didn’t give a damn about going on the air. I didn’t want you standing behind me while I did.” He sounds tired, but there’s an edge to his voice, anger and frustration. He had been looking for a story like this for two years never thinking he would find one and she’s been sitting on it the entire time. He had wanted to do this, pull the plug on what had turned into a miserable career and she had dragged it out, dragged him into this.

She stares at him open mouthed, trying to say something in response to his confession but there isn’t anything she can say to ease the ache she knows is sitting in his chest. There isn’t anything she can do to stop the tears that have sprung up in his eyes.

“We could have-”

“Been the constant nagging thorn in their side? What good would that have done? If nothing else the Lansings would have gotten bored with us.” 

“But-” she isn’t prepared to be making this argument, to have him make it for her. In the back of her mind she had known they would have to have this conversation. She had known she would have to ask, but she had been so caught up in the story, had let it distract her, that she’s feeling blindsided.

“You’re coming with me.”

“Where are we-?”

“Where were you thinking?” He’s so calm, so rational. She had just thrown his life away, everything he had and everything he had ever known and he hadn’t blinked. He had always told her he would follow her to hell and back if she would just let him, let him be there, but she hadn’t expected him to make it sound so easy.

“Will,” she doesn’t know why she’s pleading with him except for that she’s the one that’s crying quietly, brushing absently at the falling tears as she reaches for the tablet sitting on the couch. She can’t explain how the pieces all fit together but she can show him, let him page through the notes she had taken, let him decipher the mess she had made.

*

She almost turns around leaving the AWM building. She had begged Will to see her out, pleading as he had changed into his street clothes, but he had been insistent, quietly tucking her against him in one final hug. They had finished filming the final segments. The show had been cut together. It would air tomorrow night in place of their regular show. She would have to be in London, in the network’s studio there, to oversee minor technical details. She had to go, but everything in her is screaming at her to stay just a little longer.

She slides into the waiting car, shoving her overnight bag onto the seat beside her as she glances back up toward Will’s office, the window she knows he’s watching from. She’s made this trip a dozen times, office to airport, airport to airport, New York, London, Berlin, but this time she’s filled with apprehension, anxiety twisting in her stomach as she winds her way through security. She’s supposed to be attending a conference. They had picked this weekend because of that, the extra layer of security the excuse had offered her.

Customs is perfunctory. A quick layover she tells them, a stop on her way to Berlin, and they let her through, but she has more trouble leaving the airport. She’s checked into her connecting flight, but she can’t get on it, she also can’t leave the terminal, technically, and she has to talk herself out of trouble when security finds her loitering by a secure exit. It’s a lie she’s used before, a gift for her daughter she had left where she had been sitting before she had gone through security, if she could only go and get it. There’s a moment when she catches herself holding her breath but the lie works and she slips out into the main portion of the airport, winding through the crowd toward the trains.

Even in the open air she’s frustrated, too anxious to feel anything but jittery and numb. It’s seven AM in New York and she wants to call the office, not to talk to Will, he’s already left, but to talk to someone, even though they should all be leaving now. Will is in the air, on his way to meet her, but she isn’t sure about the others. She hadn’t asked, had told them not to tell her. It was safer this way if they all disappeared, if no one could get in contact with anyone else until this whole thing blew over, if it ever did.

She leaves the city, slipping onto a random train. There’s nowhere she needs to be, not yet, nowhere she should be, and so she lets herself be taken by a whim, spending the rest of her afternoon popping in and out of shops along the Thames until she joins the rush hour crowd, letting the throng of people press her back underground.

She reappears at Charing Cross, slipping through the crowd of gawking tourists to make her way to the fountain. She’s early, he had made her promise to give him an extra half hour, but she panics when she doesn’t see him, when he isn’t there where he’s supposed to be.

She wants to look around, to try and find him, but she refuses to budge, she knows one casual sweep of the square will turn into a frantic spinning if she isn’t careful. She leans toward the water and brushes her hand over the water’s surface carefully breathing as the pressure on her ribs increases.

“Mac.” He’s suddenly there beside her, speaking softly, gently, trying not to scare her but she jumps anyway, turns to glare at him.

“You’re late.”

“You’re early.” He smiles, pleased. He feels safe here she realizes as he wraps his arm around her shoulder, but she’s still jumpy, still terrified.

“Don’t.” She shrugs him off, pulls away. “We need to go.”

They’re not meeting the Lansings until tomorrow, she would have to call and set up the appointment after the broadcast, right now they needed to head to the studio, get off the street and make sure everyone had cleared out of New York.

“OK.” He slides a hand down her arm, lingering, trying to comfort her but she only tugs on his suitcase, pulls it from his grasp and heads back to the station.

*

“Here.” He’s standing behind her, leaning past her to get a glimpse of the controls or that’s what she thinks until he plucks her hand from where it’s resting and lays it in his, spinning the thin gold band he had slid onto her finger in New York, before closing his hand around hers. “You hung on to it for me.” 

She feels him brush the hair from her neck, smile against the slope above her shoulder.

“You asked me to.” She tries to smile, take the edge off how flat her voice sounds, but she knows it isn’t working even if he can feel the way her pulse is jumping under her skin. They could still back out, go back to New York, pretend- This wasn’t their place she wanted to tell him, but he would tell her that it was, this was their place now, him beside her, no more running, no more worrying. It could finally, finally be the two of them if only she would stop, stop pretending.

“We have a little bit of time.” He whispers, sounding pleased and she wonders how. They had no right to do this and yet someone had to, not because Clyde was still pressing, still promising certain disaster, but because they had both known all along that the story had to come out.

“Will,” she yanks her hand away, chastising.

“Mac,” he counters softly, pulling back and she turns to glare at him.

“We’re about to blow the fucking world up and you’re-”

“Trying to distract you.” He offers honestly. “You’re so tense I’m surprised you’re not immobile.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“No it’s not. Mac, whatever-”

“I need to finish this.” She cuts him off before turning back to the controls ignoring whatever it is he wants to say.

*

“I can’t sleep here.” She tells him emphatically, knowing she’s in for a fight.

“It’s three in the morning. You have to sleep somewhere.” Will drags a hand over his face as she drops her bag on top of his suitcase.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s dusty.” He corrects her flatly. “The sheets are clean and there aren’t any bed bugs. We’re leaving first thing in the morning so if you hurry up and get in bed we can turn out the light and you won’t have to keep staring at the dust.”

“I won’t sleep here.” 

“Mac.” He’s impatient, exhausted despite the time difference, but trying to be understanding. “If you’re worried about the story-”

“Oh fuck you.” She spits out and he blinks at her surprised.

“OK.” He holds a hand out in front of him. “Is that really where you want to go right now? We can have that fight, but remember you’re stuck with me for the foreseeable future including the rest of tonight.”

She pulls a face and glares at him, but bites her tongue to keep from saying anything until she can keep her temper in check. “I’m not sleeping here.”

“All right.” He shrugs. “Do you mind if I do?”

She does, but she knows better than to tell him that so she watches him climb into bed with the lights still on and fall almost instantly asleep. He sleeps deeply for a couple of hours as she leans on his suitcase and then sits on the bag he hadn’t had a problem with leaving on the floor.

“You can’t sleep in your clothes.” He murmurs half asleep blinking at her as he wakes and she ignores him. “Mac.”

“I heard you.”

“Are your pajamas in my bag?”

“No.”

He sits up squinting at her. “Did you pack pajamas?” 

“No, I burned them along with everything else in my apartment.”

He sighs but doesn’t take the bait. “Could you put them on? I’ll buy you a clean pair when I finally manage to crawl out of bed in a couple of hours.”

“I already changed.”

She had. She had reluctantly pulled a spare change of clothes from her overnight bag, swapping out her blouse and slipping a skirt on instead of the pants she had been wearing. The blazer she hugged around her to keep out the air conditioned chill was the same one she had been wearing. Her spare was tucked in with the rest of her stuff in Will’s suitcase; they hadn’t wanted to risk her packing a bag of her own.

She can’t hear the word, but she sees it form on his lips, stubborn, before he folds back the blankets and slips out of bed.

“Five minutes.” He tells her as he pulls on a sweatshirt, shoves his feet into his shoes. “I’ll be back.”

Five minutes turns into ten but he reappears as promised, tossing her a plastic bag before crawling back in bed. Tucked inside is a gray tunic, soft and silky yet thick enough that she doesn’t need to bother layering it with another shirt, and a pair of black stretch pants cut almost identically to the pants she had been wearing, formal yet flexible enough that she wouldn’t mind curling up beside him.

“You can turn the lights out when you’re done.” He mutters as he rolls over. “There’s still a couple of hours before Leona will want to talk to us.”

*

She wakes up to find him still asleep, light peeking in around the sides of the curtain, her phone buzzing incessantly on the nightstand. It’s seven AM and calls from contacts on the continent have started flooding in. She had missed this, missed that, she had missed so much. No one questioned what she had said, the show they had aired. There was only one complaint, one request, more.  
*

Thursday morning weeks later she wakes to find Will pacing in front of the windows, already dressed, his briefcase sitting beside the door.

“I thought we could get breakfast out.” He says when he realizes she’s awake.

She yawns and rubs a hand over her eyes, blinking at him as she sits up, kicking the duvet down to the end of the bed. “We don’t have time.”

“We could stop at the tea stall SoHo. It’s not exactly on the way but you’ve mentioned it a couple of times since we got here and-” He trails off sharply, obviously frustrated, not with her, but with what she wasn’t sure. “I need.” He sighs, “please.”

“Sure.” She nods, reaches for him. “I’m sorry. We can stop and get breakfast, of course we can, Will. I’ve been so-”

“No.” He shakes his head, walking over so she can wrap her arms around his waist, press her face into his t-shirt, his hands gentle on the back of her head. “This has been hard for you. I’m a crotchety old man who can’t stand the sight of this much concrete. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

“You’re not.” She assures him, pulling back enough to peer up at him. “I think we forgot to pick up the clothes I ordered. I can’t stand the thought of showing up in the same old thing. Leona might start threatening to hire me a stylist.”

He laughs, somewhat confused by the sentiment, before moving back toward the windows. “Is that what’s in this bag? They had it delivered. Security must have opened it downstairs.” He apologizes. “It looks like everything’s still folded. Not a wrinkle in sight. Leona will be proud.”

*

They slip into the tea stall, sliding through the crowd, her hand clasped tightly in his as he clears the way with a series of polite excuse mes until they reach an empty table near the back.

“We can share.” She insists, but he’s already taken a seat, thrown his bag onto the chair beside him.

“Should I order?” He asks tipping his head toward the back and she shrugs. Someone needed to stay with the table; he would have better luck making his way through the crowd.

She sits and watches him, smiling when he bends down to talk to the child behind him in line, the dark mop of hair bobbing enthusiastically at whatever he ways saying. The line moves, Will orders and pays. She watches the child disappear back into the crowd, watches Will slip into the seat beside her. He’d been smart, ordering two pots of tea, enough extra water to drown them both, and a smattering of breakfast food. 

She’s downing her third cup of tea, still scalding hot when she feels his hand on her arm and looks up, turns to see what he’s seen and feels his grip tighten.

“Steve.” She breathes the name out in a sudden rush as she feels her feet press into the floor but she stays seated, watching as he weaves through the now thinner crowd toward their table. 

“Steven.” She calls again and, disregarding Will’s hold on her arm, jumps up to throw her arms around his neck, laughing. “What are you? When did you get back? You were- I thought you were in Berlin. When I called last month mother said-”

“Oh,” He laughs, hugging her fiercely. “Sheila called last week. She wanted me home, you know how she is. I wasn’t doing much, so here I am.”

She swats at his arm as he steps back. “Your wife loves you. You know she hates how much you travel.”

“I hate it too.” He chastises before turning to Will, holding out his hand. “It’s been a while. Mind if I join you?”

It quickly becomes apparent that they had planned this, although it isn’t clear to her who’s idea it had been. She knows it’s been all over the local news, their preemptive exile to London showing up alongside the riots in the States, the burning buildings and the crying bloody faces. Steve would have known she was here, could have found out she was staying as the Lansings’ guest. He could have contacted Will, but it would have been easier for Will to contact him, if he could find a moment to squeeze the call in between the calls she had him making, the follow up she had him doing.

They were still short staffed. It had been apparent by the Monday after they had aired the story that things weren’t going to blow over like they had hoped. The international community was enraged, the US was burning from the inside out. She had a dozen stories she needed to air; she had spent the entire weekend trying to piece them together.

Jim had been the easiest to reach, and although she knew he would insist on being the last one to leave, he had contacted the others, slowly working back through the spider web of connections to find the rest of the staff and help them find their way to her.

Sloan had been the first to arrive, tanned, and uncharacteristically snarky, whining about her interrupted sojourn in Oxford. Tess had shown up the next day and then Martin. This morning she was hoping to see Maggie and possibly Neal, if he had managed to make his way out of Calgary. There were a few people Jim was still trying to track down, but she didn’t have the time or mental energy to worry about that; this morning was the first break she’d had all week.

“You should hire some more people, assuming they’re letting you keep the studio.” Steve says it with a grin, like he knew without a doubt the studio and her team were here to stay. “Have they tried prying it away from you?”

“I can hardly get her to leave.” Will chips in, sliding a plate of baked goods in her direction. “Leona gave her free reign, offered to put her name above the door.”

She breaks one side off of a crumpet and shoves the plate back toward him. “He’s exaggerating.”

“Leona’s thrilled.” Will insists.

“You look pleased.” Steve pulls the plate out of her reach, sets the rest of the crumpet on her plate like she’s still a child.

“Either you’re being sarcastic or you’re talking to Will.” She grumbles at him, dropping a dollop of jam onto her plate with deliberate care, waiting for the tight lipped sigh she knows is coming.

“You have to eat something.”

“I did.”

“You drank an entire pot of tea. Will’s been picking at your plate since I joined you.”

“That’s,” she makes a face and shoves part of the crumpet into her mouth, not entirely surprised when he laughs.

“Sheila keeps insisting Nicky act her age but I keep telling her she really ought to spend more time with my sisters. She would worry less.”

Mac snorts, shakes her head. “I think you have that backwards. Sophie would scare her half to death.”

“Sophie’s on a beach in Spain in a $200 bathing suit. There are worse lives. You should see the view from her bedroom window.” He continues, turning to Will, and she scoffs.

“It’s a vacation rental. Her name isn’t even on the lease.”

Steve raises an eyebrow into a perfect arch. “Bitter.”

“She hasn’t done a thing with her life and she gets to-”

“Marry a rich old man and cry into her coffee like the rest of us.”

“She’s gotten everything she ever wanted.” Mac protests despite knowing that her sister, alone in Spain, is miserable, whiling away the hours while her husband conducts business across the continent.

“She wants to come home.”

“I want to go home.” She isn’t surprised the confession slips out as an offering to Steve despite the fact she’s been yearning to tell Will the same thing for days. It’s been sitting on the tip of her tongue since Steve had shown up and he seems to know that.

“Where is home?” He asks in that same gentle calm voice he always used. The one that means he’s listening despite the well humored glint in his eye.

She glares at him. He always asked her the same question. He liked her to be specific. She couldn’t fault him; growing up home had been more of a feeling than a place: warm sunshine and vanilla ice cream, the sound of her father’s singing echoing up the stairwell to their rented flat.

“Not DC.” She whispers because it hurts too much to think of what might have happened to her neighborhood. “New York.”

“Half the country is a war zone. There’s rioting in New York.” He’s gentle but firm. He wants an answer he can use.

She bites her lip to keep it from trembling and looks away. She can feel Will shifting beside her, resisting the urge to reach over and hug her. She doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t know where they stand- she’s wearing his ring but they still haven’t talked about it, haven't told anyone- or if it’s because he’s deferring to her, the defensive set of her shoulders, the intensity with which she had been watching her brother.

“I want to go home, Steve.” She says again and he sighs, a reminder of how petulant she had been as a child.

“You need to be more specific if you want me to do anything about it.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything.” She snaps sharply, unrelenting despite her immediate remorse, the surprise Will must be feeling. “You always fixed everything before.”

“You were twelve and crying in the girls bathroom at school when Mary found you, where was that?” He strings the connection along, musing, ignoring her anger.

“I was twelve,” she replies sourly. He could do the math. He would remember better than her where they had been that year. “Saint Bart’s school.”

“Africa.”

“Yeah.”

“Which-?”

She shrugs, her scowl softening. “It took her twenty minutes to get me to leave the stall I was hiding in. She practically had to drag me home. You were out in the yard, laughing at something.”

“Something I’d seen on TV. You were a mess, still sniffling, half your hair had fallen out of your braid. You wouldn’t let me clean you up.”

“So you dragged me out back,” She smiles weakly, “and threw me in the water storage tank, uniform and all. Mother was pissed.”

“At me.” Steven laughs with a quick shake of his head. “She never did find out what happened even after you punched Rose Solarin in the face. Come spend the weekend with Sheila and I. You and Will could use a break from the city.”

“No, Steve.” She’s frowning at him despite knowing she won’t win the argument if she starts one. “If-”

“Someone comes looking for you, it’s not going to make a difference whether you’re there or not. Come spend a couple of days with us. The kids have been asking to see you and that old squeaky floor misses your stomping.” 

“I don’t know. I have work-”

“We should go, Mac.” Will cuts in, brushing his hand over hers under the table. “The suite is nice but I’d love to be able to see the sky.”

“Nebraska boy.” Steve recalls and the two men share a smile as she scowls faintly at the table and the empty teacup she hadn’t asked to have refilled.

“If there’s-”

“No one’s going to tie you to the radiator, Mac. If you have to leave it won’t be the first time one of us has run off in the middle of dinner. You should come. Say hello.”

*

She isn’t entirely convinced she wants to be getting on a train right now. They had made it through the week, through the weeks that had passed. They had aired several huge stories, follow ups to what had started out as Moldova, as the interviews Charlie had insisted she do. They had done the one thing she had sworn she would never do and now she was standing here on the platform at Stratford Station about to take a weekend trip.

They had left the studio around four, eleven eastern she still insists mentally even as she yawns blearily at the clock across from her that read four twenty three AM. They had another six minutes until their next train arrived. Will hadn’t said anything in the intervening half hour other than to offer her half the sandwich he was picking at.

“It’s twenty six minutes once the train gets here. Steven will meet us at the station. He promised bacon egg and cheese sandwiches for breakfast.”

Will nods and shoves the sandwich wrapper in his pocket. “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“You want to go.” She says sincerely and he smiles at her softly before picking up the weekender bag by his feet. “We could disappear off into the countryside, just the two of us.”

“We’re not eloping.” She tells him flatly and his smile grows as he leans over to brush a kiss on the top of her head.

“We’ll talk about that some other time. Right now, I want to hear some more about those breakfast sandwiches.”

*

Sheila had insisted she didn’t need the help. Mac was a guest in her house and even so, she was supposed to be taking a break not helping with the laundry, but she had insisted, and Sheila, used to living with Steve, had relented. And so Mac had carried the pile of folded sheets up to the closet at the top of the stairs and promptly snapped the stubborn door shut on her hand.

“I slammed it in the door.” She sniffs as Steve appears from around the bend in the stairs several minutes later, “I’m fine.”

“Uh huh.” Steve shakes his head. She had known she wouldn’t be able to convince him, but she’s surprised by how concerned he looks as he bounds up the last set of steps two at a time. “Let me take a look.”

“It’s not broken.” She insists as he kneels in front of her, fixing her with an equally stubborn, if more long suffering look. She knows her insistence, her pouting isn’t helping, but she knows he can’t help but poke and prod and she doesn’t want him bothering her right now. Her chest was aching with the tears she hadn’t yet managed to shed and she wanted to be left alone.

She knew she should have moved, burrowed in somewhere where it would have taken him longer to find her, buts she had known he would show up eventually and she hadn’t wanted to move. She had wanted to be left alone. She had wanted to wallow in the ache in her hand. “It isn’t.”

“I know. If it was you’d be cursing.”

There isn’t much she can say in response to that, nothing that’s going to make him leave her alone so she presses her teeth together and lets Nicky answer from where she’s standing by the door to her room watching carefully. “She was, daddy. Like a Marine.”

“She was, was she?” Steve chuckles, almost tender in his good humor, turning her hand over, so he can slide his fingers over her palm, distract her from the way his fingers come to rest against her pulse point. “Go and grab my bag from the study would you, please.”

Nicky hesitates but ultimately disappears, slipping silently down the creaky old stairs as Mac sniffs angrily to herself, carefully reining in her emotions, her annoyance and her distress as Steve settles in to wait out his explanation; it’s not in his posture, but it’s there in the tone of his voice, carefully insistent. “What happened?”

“I shut my hand-” He’s given her too much time to think. She’s already exasperated. That wasn’t a good place to be starting from, she knows that, but the silence had left her edgy. She needed to settle down before he tried to push his advantage. It was his favorite trick, one she had always been thankful Will had never figured out, because already she can feel her resolve slipping. She didn’t want to end up begging him again, pleading with him to fix things, but she can feel the familiar spinning, the cloying panic at her lack of control.

“Before that.” The good humor was still there, but he’s more serious now, pressing, although she thinks he already knows exactly what he’s waiting to hear.

“Before what?” She’s playing dumb and he knows it, but as a stalling tactic it works well enough, better than another petty snub.

“You’re crying.” It’s a gentle observation but she can hear the implication underneath.

She doesn’t let herself breathe, doesn’t let him slip another comment in before replying. If he’s going to insist on pushing, two can play that game. “It hurts like a-”

“I know that. You slammed the door on your hand.” He reminds her flatly, interrupting. “You and I both know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“It hurts.” She’s whining a little and she hates how pathetic she sounds, but being any more honest is only going to end in more tears.

“I suppose it does.” Steven sighs and she scowls at him, drawing her injured hand closer to her chest, disregarding any sign of his displeasure as she bolsters herself with the annoyance his curt remark draws up.

“You’re being flippant.” 

“You’re always so sweet.”

“If there weren’t children-” She threatens and he smiles with a shrug, despite the way she’s glaring at him.

“They’ve heard it all. I’m sure Veronica’s heard it all today.”

“I shouldn’t have-” She relents automatically, not out of habit but out of concern for the two girls she had watched grow up. He hadn’t meant anything by it, she knew that. He saw the same world she did and worried less, but he was the one here, the one meant to protect them and she figured that helped.

“They’re old enough to know their aunt has a potty mouth.”

“And here I was thinking I was the cool aunt.” She tries to apologize. She knows she doesn’t need to, not for that anyway, but she’s been needling him all day, insisting he accompany her her even as he tried to get her to spend more time with Will.

“You are the cool aunt.” Steve sighs. “I don’t know that that says about the rest of us, but lordy.”

“Lordy?” She echos laughing softly, surprised when she feels herself relax, lets herself be lulled by the familiarity of the banter.

“Too American?”

“Too 1950s.”

“You really ought to talk to Will.”

“About the 1950s?” He’s lost her. She can’t seem to find the connection he has, and the shift in his mood, his sudden seriousness only adds to her sense of disorientation as she looks for the missing link.

“About whatever has you slamming your hand in doors.”

“I didn’t do it intentionally, Steven.” She emphasizes his name but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“You were distracted.”

She digs in for an argument, seeing, suddenly, the inevitability, knowing she would rather argue about this her job, his work, than whatever he seems to be hinting at. Neither of them would win but she wouldn’t get much push back either. “Have you seen the latest wire reports? Of course I’m distracted. I’ve been distracted for the last-” 

“What happened?” Will is there, behind Nicky, carrying the bag she had been sent to retrieve. “Nicky said you-”

“I’m fine.” It’s an automatic response, but it isn’t a lie, not completely. Steven was giving her a look that made her want to smash something into his face, but that was an old impulse she was used to ignoring.  
“She’s fine.”

“You’re,” Will drops the bag by her feet and kneels down to brush his fingers over the side of her face.

“I slammed my hand in the door. It scared the shit out of me.”

He makes a sympathetic noise as he sits down next to her, reaching to wrap his arm around her shoulder. “Let Steve look at your hand while I tell you about the travel plans Jim is making. He’s looking at flights to Switzerland.”

*

She hadn’t expected to see him. She hadn’t run through the mental checklist of staff. She hadn’t realized he was the last one, the last one out and she’s laughing, arms still wrapped around Jim’s neck when she catches sight of Will’s face, the flicker of something that chills her to the bone.

“What happened?” She’s looking at Jim because whatever it is, Will isn’t going to tell her. Whatever it is, Will had to have known for days and hasn’t said anything because Jim hasn’t been here long enough to say anything and she certainly doesn’t know what’s changed.

“Everybody’s out.” Jim repeats, shaking his head, confused by the panic in her voice. “Everyone’s safe.”

“No, no.” She’s shaking her head now too. “What happened?”

“Mac,” It’s Will, standing behind Jim with his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go up to the house and have dinner. I offered Jim the spare room but he’s insisting on heading into London tonight.”

“I’m not a child.” She sees Steven raise his head from where he’s sitting by the front door, book in hand, but she ignores him the same way Will ignores the warning in her voice.

“Mac, come on.”

“Tell me.” She can feel Jim’s hands on her arms now as he slides to the side, out of the line of fire.

“Tell me, Will.” She isn’t sure why she’s so angry, why whatever this is is so important, but she needs to know.

“I was just thinking about how beautiful you looked standing there.” He’s speaking softly, like she isn’t yelling, like he hasn’t heard a word she’s said.

“God dammit, Will.”

Jim hasn’t taken his hand off her arm. He ought to she thinks, but he tightens his grip in warning instead. This isn’t the first fight he’s seen between the two of them. He should know better.

“The government’s cracking down.” He’s still not answering her, but this seems closer to the truth so she tries to be careful.

“We’ve been watching it all week. We spent the entire B-block-”

“Not just on the protesters.”

Will slides his hand from her arm and the look is back, the mix of grief and sadness that chokes off the air in her lungs.

“What?” She looks at Jim, imploring, when it’s clear that Will can’t bring himself to continue.

“We’re all safe.” Jim repeats insistently looking like he would rather not have to be here, like he doesn’t want to be the one to tell her. “We’re all ok, but we can’t go back.”

“I know New York is-” she swallows, a mess would be an understatement. New York was destroyed, DC was still standing, for now, but she could never go back to the places she had been. She had known that for weeks now.

“No.” Jim cuts her off before she has to finish and she sighs, waiting for him to clarify. “Things aren’t getting better. The government’s going to win this one and when it does we’ll all be dead before we can set foot on American soil. They’re beyond pissed, Mac. You should have let it go after we aired the story the first time.”

“No.” She isn’t sure what she’s protesting: the horror of the statement, the truth of it, his assessment. “I’m sure-”

“I have a copy of the memorandum. This isn’t some peacetime show of force, this is martial law.”

“When? When did he tell you?” She’s demanding before she’s even turned to face Will. “Before you called Steve. That’s why you called him isn’t it, because you’re still thinking about it aren’t you? You fucking douchebag.”

She wants to hit him. She wants to beat him senseless, but Jim is there with his fingers pressing bruises into her arms and Steve has come up beside Will, waiting, she knows, for when her anger fizzles out. 

“You would go back if I- if I-” she chokes down a sob.

“Mac,” he’s trying not to cry now too, fingers tapping together as he resists the urge to reach for her. He can’t step any closer, not yet, even though he wants to. “I would never, not to certain death, but I can’t- we can’t keep- I love you.”

He stops himself before the but can slip out, before he says I love you but, I love you but I can’t keep doing this, because she knows he can’t. She had thought she had stopped asking him to. She had let him come along, she had asked him to, begged him to on that last night in New York.

“If you want me to let you go.”

She doesn’t want to hear the rest of what he has to say. She had asked him before, had begged him when she had been too afraid, when she had been unable to forgive herself, but it had been years since then. It had been months since the thought of anything but the two of them had entered her mind.

“No, no no.” She can hear herself saying, whispering it because saying it any louder would make her voice break, make her break.

“Was the ring a practical joke?” She really shouldn’t. She knows she shouldn’t. She doesn’t want to, but there’s nothing to stop the words from slipping out because maybe she had been right all along. Maybe she wanted him but she didn’t need him, maybe this wouldn’t kill her, maybe if she scared herself enough she would come to her senses.

He doesn’t answer. She knows he can’t answer. She isn’t looking at him and even if she were there’s nothing for him to say. This was the same it had always been. She’s crying and she’s sorry but not enough. She’s sorry but only about the things she’s said. She’s sorry but she isn’t sorry about him, could never be sorry for him, because she couldn’t be sorry for something she didn’t regret.

“Zee, stop.” It’s Steve. He’s close, too close to be smart, but she’s always loved that about him, even when it made her furious. “Take a deep breath. It’s ok. There’s no decisive victory in this one. That one last fight you’re looking for isn’t going to end the way you want it to. You can’t argue your way into happily ever after.”

“I don’t want to elope.” She’s still crying but it’s out of confusion now, because she knows what he’s implying but she doesn’t know why.

“No one said anything about eloping.”

“She did.” Will cuts in quietly. “I thought you were teasing, Mac.” He says it so tenderly, so gently that she’d be crying if she weren’t already. “I know you don’t- I wouldn’t- I just want to hold you forever, Mac. That’s all I want. Just let me hold you.”

“Will,” she whispers pushing at Steve, shoving at him, but he stays where he is, even as she yanks her arm out of his grasp and she reaches for Will.

“I want,” she tells him. She wanted to, more than anything she wanted to, but it scared her, terrified her to hear him talk about forever when the only thing forever meant was that he would lose her and she didn’t want that for him. She didn’t want that for him because him losing her meant she could lose him too. She couldn’t survive that. She would have to be the one to go first, but she couldn’t do that to him. She couldn’t do that to him if she said yes.

She had said please and I want you and don’t leave me, please don’t ever leave me, but she hadn’t said yes. He hadn’t asked her to, not in so many years, but she knows the offer still stands, has the proof of it on her finger.

Just hold on to this for me. He had asked told her as she had tried to wrap her arms around his neck as they stood in his office. She had wanted another hug, a reason to cling to him for another moment, but he had refused to release his grip on her hand, had slipped the ring on her finger and repeated the request. Hold on to this for me. To hope, she knew that’s what he had meant, hope for them or for something else she hadn’t been sure at the time but now she knows what he had intended. He had wanted to know she would be ok. The hope had been for her, hope that she could make it through without him. That’s what the look had been, the sad satisfaction, the recognition of his own mortality.

It’s a familiar feeling. One she had learned to live with a long time ago even if she had never been able to resist the temptation to shove it away: the distraction his apartment, his bed, his arms had always provided.

She doesn’t want to think of her life here without him any more than he had his life without her, but he had and she could if she needed to but she didn’t want to, not right now, not ever again. She would have to, but she had always had to, and she had managed somehow not to, he had somehow allowed her not to.

She wanted to say yes.

“I don’t know how to,” she pauses to take a breath, lean into the corner of Steve’s shoulder as Will steps closer. “Without being scared. Without pretending.” She trails off.

“I know.”

“I want to.” She thinks she might be pleading.

“I know. I know.” She’s in his arms suddenly, listening to him soothe her, listening to him tell her that she doesn’t have to be afraid and she almost believes him, she almost can.

“Whatever happens it’ll be ok.” He promises her again and she nods, wiping her eyes against his shoulder, trying to find her breath, draw more air into her lungs that ached the way her hand had the day before, steady and constant, but not with the sharp stinging pain she had expected.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to.” He waits until she’s pulled back to look at him to continue. “But I knew you wouldn’t want to be distracted while we were on the air and after, you were so worn out. You hardly made it home before you fell asleep. You kept nodding off on the Tube.”

“I thought, maybe, the next morning,” he continues, more apologetically now that she’s calming down, “but you seemed so content. You weren’t looking over your shoulder and I couldn’t.”

“Yeah,” she breathes out and lets him hug her again, lets herself lean into him. There’s a part of her that’s glad he hadn’t told her, a part of her that isn’t wounded by the deceit because she could understand. She was always looking for an out. It was second nature now. She had never worried about him doing the same but now she wonders if she should have, if she should. She doesn’t want to think about that but now she can’t stop.

“I don’t want you to go.” She can hear herself saying but it’s not until he kisses her gently, chastely, to shut her up that she realizes she’d been repeating herself.

“We’re not going anywhere.” He promises her, cups her chin in her hand and meets her eye to repeat himself. “No more war zones.”

“I promise.” She says before he even has the time to ask and he smiles that smile that she loves, the one tinged with silent joyous laughter, the one she saw so rarely, even now. “And we’ll stay.”

“It isn’t New York.” He cautioned softly, but she’d never loved New York for what it was, had loved DC in a way, but even then it had been less about the place itself.

“There’s a studio with my name on the door.” She laughs a little teasing, surprising herself and he grins.

“Is that what it takes?”

“Maybe,” she tries to shrug but he’s taken her hand and she’s too worried about dislodging his grip to manage the full effect.

“Well all right, then.” He breathes out, glances at her, smiles again.

“Hold on to this for me?” He asks, her hand in his, his fingers winding around the gold band she’s been wearing for weeks without comment.

“Yeah,” she nods and then returns his smile, surprised to find herself shy, cautious. “Yes. I can,” she nods again to cover a nervous swallow. “I can do that.”


End file.
